12.5 Tools: Psychological Intelligence

Many project professionals feel underappreciated. Project managers are always under pressure to cut costs and to deliver on time. When a project comes together nicely, colleagues may take the project’s competitive benefits for granted. When a project goes sour, the project team takes the heat. That said, part of the “I don’t get no respect!” perception is self-inflicted. Project professionals often rely too much on technical skills. They don’t master the art of managing relationships. Figure 12.8 depicts psychological intelligence, a skill that will help you more artfully cultivate productive relationships. Let’s take a closer look at this process.

Define the Decision Center

As a project management professional, you play a key role in developing your organization’s capabilities and capacity. Some of the critical value-added initiatives you influence include product development, process improvement, technology adoption, and building out physical infrastructure. Each of these initiatives comes to life via one or more projects. On each project, your job is to identify and influence the key decision-makers.

To effectively influence these decision makers, you need to figure out what makes them tick. Simply put, you need to gain insight into why they act the way they do and how they get the results they are seeking. Gathering psychological intelligence is the key. This involves assessing sources of power, evaluating personal motivations, and figuring out how these decision-makers perceive you. If you use psychological intelligence to help colleagues achieve success, your influence—and your image as a strategic player—will grow.

Assess Sources of Power

You already know about the five main sources of power: Referent, expert, legitimate, reward, and coercive power. Once you define the decision center, i.e., identify the key decision-makers for the decision you are trying to influence, ask, “What is each person’s source of power?”

Answering this question isn’t difficult. You simply need the discipline to follow the process. Begin by looking at titles and the organization chart. Doing this simple homework will give you insight into a colleague’s coercive, reward, and legitimate power. Your experience, or that of colleagues, tells you whether a person really knows their stuff. Assessing referent power is a little trickier. You need to do a deeper homework—i.e., ask questions and be observant—to find out how much of a person’s power comes from their likability—and the respect they have earned among colleagues.

Evaluate Motivations

Getting into the minds of colleagues to ascertain what is really driving their decisions is much more difficult to do well. You are neither a psychiatrist nor a mind reader. However, you need to do your best to accurately diagnose motivations. The following three hints can help.

Hint #1: What Gets Measured Gets Done

This cliché has the virtue of being true. Performance measurement motivates decisions. If you can determine how your colleagues’ performance is measured, you will gain credible insight into how they will make decisions.

Hint #2: Which Benefits Do Colleagues Value Most?

Your colleagues do not view all benefits as equally valuable. Three types of benefits associated with projects can influence them: Project, process, and personal (see Table 12.5).

Project Benefits

Project benefits are often closely tied to performance measures. Ask, “What are the project’s deliverables—and how are they being measured?” You will discover that three project benefits are almost universally valued: Cost, functionality, on-time completion. Your ability to positively impact performance in these, and other areas, increases your influence.

Process Benefits

Process benefits focus on how decision-making processes impact a colleague’s well-being. Is the process easy—both to understand and to comply with? If you can make a process hassle-free, colleagues will appreciate your efforts. If the process is opaque, cumbersome, and annoying, colleagues will be frustrated. They will disengage, perhaps pushing collaboration out of reach. Design processes for ease of use.

Personal Benefits

Personal benefits deal with your colleagues’ sense of identity, personal well-being, and self-concept as well as how others perceive them. If you can boost an influencer’s likability and respect, you will likely gain their support.

Hint #3: What Are the Risks?

Remember, almost all decisions incur risks. As you can imagine, influencers view a high risk-to-benefit ratio unfavorably. They also perceive certain risk profiles as unacceptable. Influencers will not support decisions that deliver product and process benefits at the peril of risks that are primarily personal.

You need to design your project strategy and manage your specific personal interactions to work with and support key decision-makers’ motivations.

Determine Perceptions

To enhance your project team’s influence on key decisions, you need to know how your colleagues perceive your performance. The best way to find out is to ask them. To begin, invite your influencers to rate the project team’s performance on a continuum ranging from negative to positive. For specific activities/processes, ask colleagues to evaluate two dimensions: 1) project team’s deliverables and the project team’s people. Map their responses to the two-by-two matrix shown in Figure 12.9. As you uncover negative perceptions, dig a little deeper by asking colleagues for a more detailed assessment. These two questions can help:

1. What do you expect from us as a project team?

2. How well are we performing compared to your expectations? In other words, is there a gap between your expectations and the actual experiences we provide?

Colleagues’ answers to these questions will help you identify where you are performing well and pinpoint where you need to improve. Too many service gaps will cause the project team to lose credibility and power. Your likability and respectability will suffer as a result.

Once you know who the influencers are, what motivates them, and where you stand, you can develop a strategy to improve the project team’s position of respect and influence. Your best long-term approach is to improve performance to close any service gaps you have discovered. To get maximum return on your performance improvements, you need to let your colleagues know that you listened to them, valued their feedback, and acted on it. Then, you need to share your success stories.

The bottom line: Show colleagues how what you have done helps them achieve their own goals and contributes to your company’s success. Combining performance with proactive communication reinforces the respect your corporate fans have and helps win over critics.