Manager's Musings: #5

A tale of fours: the compass and the DNA

Apparently, many important things in the history of humanity (as we know it) come in fours. The four seasons, the Beatles, the Gospels in the Bible, the chambers of the heart, the suits in playing cards, the Grand Slam tennis tournaments, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles… Even the Three Musketeers had to add one member to be complete. Four seems to be a magic number in lots of situations, and I’m sure the Fantastic Four would agree.

I am often asked about the “ideal” profile of a research project manager - what kind of skills and knowledge are required for a great project manager when it comes to scientific projects. Many people would look for official certification (like PMI’s Project Management Professional - PMP, for example), some would emphasise the need to understand the underlying science, others would underline the need for legal or financial skills. Usually I respond that I hire based on personality more than anything else. Upon reflection, I asked myself: what kind of personality is that, really? 

Intuitively, you will have guessed already that it is a combination of aspects. More than I could list, quite honestly. But, at the fundamental level, I would say that the brain of an outstanding project manager comprises four different brains. You need to be four professionals in one, as if those different actors inside of you represented the four cardinal directions that you can use as a compass to get projects to where they need to be. 

1. The “Scientist” brain

This speaks to the visionary nature of scientists, the ability to imagine the future, the fearless attitude towards the trial and error. It is impossible to have a perfect plan for everything in advance. And yes, you can manage uncertainty and register risks and assumptions, but the most powerful tool to guide a project manager is to be able to have a mental picture of what your destination is: what has to be created, how it is different compared to the state of the art, why it is important to spend years in pursuing that dream. This naive child-like attitude towards the “everything is possible if you can think of it” will drive you forwards in more situations than you think. However, one has to be careful to show the kid where the limits are, and this is where the second brain comes in handy.

2. The “Engineer” brain

The second brain is focussed on a fascination for machinery and how the different nuts and bolts work together as a whole. Essentially pragmatic in nature, this brain will try to break down the dream into tangible pieces that we can actually handle in the real world, focussing on performance. This brain is all about instruments, tests and quality checks, flow charts and diagrams. An “if it works, don’t touch it” philosophy. In some ways, this second brain controls the wild imagination of the first one. But they need to co-exist, otherwise the overly realistic engineer mind may prevail and diminish the project ambition. 

3. The “Psychologist” brain

We know by now that managing projects is very much about managing people. Projects are not mysterious self-fulfilling entities – they are done by people. So, it is indispensable that the project manager can understand the individuals that contribute to the project’s tasks. Not just their professional ‘tags’ or titles, but their aspirations, their incentives, their fears, their relationship with their institutions, when they’re honest and when they’re bluffing, what moves them. This requires a psychologist mentality genuinely interested in human nature, a disposition to understand individual circumstances, a capacity for empathy. Not everyone will be an open book, but eventually you get to know most people sufficiently well. This will allow the manager to optimise the required actions, analyse responsibilities, select the best way to convey a message and generally get as close as possible to getting the maximum productivity from each participant in the project.  

4. The “Coach” brain

But individuals do not work in isolation. Every project creates several communities around work streams, tasks and activities, and people need to collaborate to achieve the desired output. We therefore need to understand how people behave in groups and create a team culture that supports and enhances individual performance. Call it a coach brain, or a sociologist brain if you like, but this side of the project manager is constantly thinking about creating the appropriate work and communication dynamics between individuals and teams that best serves the project – including apparently mundane aspects such as how often you meet face to face, how to design meeting agendas for a perfect flow, which communication channels are used, a certain project etiquette… A lot of it has to do with generating a shared vision, overcoming the natural biases and different specialty angles that people will inevitably use when defining and trying to solve a problem. 

In essence then, the first brain is the daring visionary – the second converts that vision into something we can actually manage and work with, so that, informed by the third brain’s understanding of individual motivations, the fourth can entice the team around a common objective and culture for the project as a whole. The four personalities dynamically interact over time, and you can switch them on or off depending on the situation to navigate towards the desired destination.

Of course, you can also have other personality treats such as a positive and friendly nature, or an innate ability to mediate, or a quality or service-minded disposition…, but they are all icings on the cake if you ask me. I still think the “brains” above are the four nucleobases that form the outstanding project manager’s DNA – no longer A, C, G, T, but S, E, P, C instead. ‘SPEC’ sounds great, actually. 

So, from now on, whenever someone asks me “Who would be the ideal candidate for this new research project manager position that we just opened?”, I’ll just say, with an air of mystery: “SPEC…”, and forward them to this piece. It will save me a lot of time and add to the mystique, maybe.