Top Leadership Tips From the PMI Future 50
Transcript
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Each year, PMI shines the spotlight on project leaders who are changing the world through their work. Today, a few of those changemakers share their own keys to success and how fellow rising project leaders are making their mark. High on that list: agility and collaboration.
LOVY BHATIA
Nowadays, I think it’s much more integrated, and the project managers are not just going by the books. It’s more like let’s do it together, and they’re more agile. Rather than whatever we’ve planned last month, let’s go by that, it’s more like: Will it work today? Will it work tomorrow? If not, let’s change it.
NARRATOR
The world is changing fast. And every day, project professionals are turning ideas into reality—delivering value to their organizations and society as a whole. On Projectified®, we’ll help you stay on top of the trends and see what’s ahead for The Project Economy—and your career.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
This is Projectified®. I’m Steve Hendershot.
PMI’s annual Future 50 list serves as an introduction to an emerging class of project superstars—rising leaders who are championing innovation, fostering collaboration and delivering results worldwide. You should absolutely visit PMI.org/Future50 to see the full list and learn about their amazing work.
On Projectified®, we spoke with three Future 50 leaders to hear about what has made them so successful, pulling out a few tips that should be useful to other project leaders looking to deliver value to their organizations and the world.
You already heard one Future 50 honoree: Lovy Bhatia, a program lead at Amazon; we’ll return to her later. Right now, let’s head to Dubai. Projectified®’s Hannah LaBelle spoke with Kathy Johnston, the chief chocolate officer at Mirzam Chocolate Makers. Yes, chief chocolate officer. Sweet title, right? Kathy’s work is all about creating chocolates that suit customers’ tastes and honor local heritage, from the ingredients down to the packaging.
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HANNAH LABELLE
With a title like chief chocolate officer, the projects you’re leading run the gamut. You have factory expansions, new products. There is the packaging and collaborating with different partners to create it. So what’s one of the most impactful projects you’ve led, and what do you think is one of the biggest challenges you faced in that project?
KATHY JOHNSTON
The biggest project I think that I have worked on was the building of our second factory. We had initially opened in late 2016 but had taken about a year to build the factory and get the machines and put them in the way that we wanted, and figure out how to make all the products we wanted to launch with. We did a lot of fast-fail experiments. We would launch a recipe, get feedback, see how the sales were, and a lot of that helped us to sort of create a product range that was really popular. But it also meant that the factory we’d started with needed to be revisited, as well as to accommodate the extra staff and storage.
Building the next factory, we felt that even though it was quite soon after opening, that we really needed to expand and have a lot more efficiency. And I would say the biggest challenges came at the very end of the project. The machinery has started to arrive, the finishings are going in, the glass is going in, the paint is going in. And then we started to face a lot of issues commissioning and installing the machinery, and a lot of that was to do with COVID. The machines needed these specialist engineers that were supposed to come out to Dubai to help us install them. So to get around that, ultimately we set up a small, new team that commissioned the machines via Zoom with the engineers from the other countries that couldn’t come out. Zoom was a wonderful tool to sort of help us be able to communicate, but some of these machines are very, very specialist, and there’s a physical part of building the machine, but then installing with the recipe. So some of it was very frustrating, and we had to find very specific expertise in the local market, which in some cases took a few weeks to find the right people that could come on board for these sort of micro-projects.
HANNAH LABELLE
What would you say are two or three of your top lessons learned as a project leader?
KATHY JOHNSTON
One learning for me is certainly to be very change-ready and very flexible. In the food manufacturing environment, there is often very big differences in languages for us, in cultural backgrounds, in styles of education and where people have come from. So that means in sort of setting goals and setting deadlines and having training, the way I need to operate to get the team on board—I have a sort of initial period of trying a few different things to see what will be the most effective. And what is the most effective for me may not be effective for everybody else on my team. It wouldn’t be a usual process in a factory environment that everybody has a laptop and an email.
So when you are trying to bring a team of 15 people along in creating a new recipe and bringing it to market, and you want everybody to be very engaged and excited about this project but also be clear on the deadlines, clear on the batch sizes and the ingredients and everything else that we need to do, I need to be ready to change my process of project management or leading the team to really make sure that everybody is clear on what’s going on. I think that has been very challenging at different times with different projects. So that was a big one for me, is not to make it all about what suits you. I’d say the other one is to have some nonnegotiable rules, but not many. You don’t need to comment on everything. You don’t need to change everything. If you have great people around you, they will do a great job without you needing to micromanage them.
HANNAH LABELLE
How have you seen your leadership style evolve over your career?
KATHY JOHNSTON
Over time, I have become more comfortable with myself. Getting that confidence I think comes from failing a lot and realizing that in those failures comes strength and knowledge and experience that makes you human, makes you have better sympathy for everybody on your team, makes you more realistic. It’s those failures I think that have made me far more comfortable in my own skin and my own style of management. At different times, I would get feedback that made me very upset: “Oh, you’re very demanding. You’ve got OCD with all of your schedules and yellow stickies.” And I would be like, “Oh no, maybe I should be one of those people that should have my office door open all the time and be caring and gentle. And maybe I should let go and not have quite so many yellow stickies on my desk.”
I don’t feel like that anymore. Now I’m super happy with my yellow stickies. It’s what I need to be able to do my job. I’m okay with the different failures, and I have more confidence to take bigger risks. They work one way or they don’t work or you learn something or it morphs into something else. It’s a little bit of just age and experience. There are so many quotes about it, but I think there is truth in failure is a wonderful, wonderful tool to help you move forward if you can accept it and process it. And over time you come to realize that being able to be in a team environment or a meeting where you can say, “Oh no, I know that that doesn’t work. This is why. I’ve had that experience,” it’s the encyclopedia that you need to be able to do your job well.
HANNAH LABELLE
Looking back at the projects you’ve led and your experience so far, what is something that has surprised you? Whether it’s something that happened in your career, in your leadership experience or something that happened while you were leading a project?
KATHY JOHNSTON
Oh, I think every time a risk pays off I’m surprised. I’ve started to have a lot more fun with that going, “Oh, I’m not sure if this is going to work. Let’s try.” That’s always a big one for me. I’m far more excited about doing things where I really don’t know whether or not it’s going to have the sales impact or whether it’s going to work, but we’re going to run it. There’s going to be an experiment. Risks sometimes do pay off. It’s definitely worth taking them.
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STEVE HENDERSHOT
Our next Future 50 honoree has made an immense impact thanks to his work with at-risk youth in Cameroon.
Christian Leke Achaleke is the executive director of Local Youth Corner Cameroon in Yaoundé. The nonprofit aims to empower young people to prevent violence and promote sustainable development. Since he started as a volunteer, Christian Leke has led hundreds of projects at the organization and shares his leadership experience and peacebuilding expertise on the global stage.
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STEVE HENDERSHOT
You’ve been involved with Local Youth Corner Cameroon for more than a decade, but you’ve also had many international experiences, from higher education to trainings. How have all these experiences affected how you lead projects?
CHRISTIAN LEKE ACHALEKE
My international experiences have really influenced my personality and, of course, the institution and also our model in terms of leadership, in terms of respect for core values, in terms of ethics and morals and many others. My background is very community-oriented and one on one, working with victims of crimes, perpetrators of violence, former violent extremists, former terrorists, you can name it. The model which I’ve had is that I’m connected to local community [but] at the same time, I’m connected to policy level. I serve now as a bridge where I take perspective from [the] local community to influence global conversation, and then I take conversations from global to local. Touring the world and being part of U.N. Security Council conversations and senior trainings and African Union Peace and Security Council briefings, I bring all of this back into the local community in terms of how do we localize this conversation?
So many young people who will be in my shoes, from U.S. to across the world, would have preferred to stay there and get a good job. But we have the problem of big brain drain in our continent. “How do we want to change our countries?” These were the thoughts I had. So this is the model which we’ve been working on. And as an organization, my other colleagues have been traveling—they come back home, we work together, and this has been the outcome of all of these learnings, these trainings and the collaboration that we’ve been having.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
You bring up something really interesting: not just creating policy but making sure it’s implemented in a way that produces meaningful results on the ground. Do you have any specific examples of what you do on a project, from writing and executing to measuring the outcomes to ensure real value is delivered?
CHRISTIAN LEKE ACHALEKE
In terms of our design for the projects that we do, we really use components of design thinking. We always ensure that we build on existing conversation[s]. We try not to duplicate or create when something already exists. And in terms of capturing the impact, M&E [monitoring and evaluation] has become a very big thing in our operations. What we do in terms of our project ideas, when we identify a problem—which might not be a policy problem, which might be a problem that we need to be more practical and go down—we also look at existing policies on that conversation so that it becomes like a document to support. And then we look for resources in terms of fundraising because 98 percent of our operations is fundraising coming from foundations and others. So I want to give you an example of how we were able to move a policy conversation to practice.
In 2019, I was part of this global conversation working on the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2419, which is on youth and peace processes which talks about young people to serve as mediators, and I told myself at that meeting, “Upon return to Cameroon, Cameroon will be able to train young mediators, and we will be one of these countries to initiate what has been on this resolution.” I met my colleagues. I said, “We have to move from talking to action, and what can we do?” So we designed an initiative, which was aimed at training youth mediators, and we worked for a period of six months. We trained over 650 young people from across Cameroon on insider mediator negotiations. And as an outcome of this, we were able to set up the first-ever youth mediators network in the world. Initially, when we started mobilizing for resources, many people didn’t want to fund us, but we had to be consistent. And when we were toward the end, we had the U.N., we had the British High Commission, we had UNESCO and other stakeholders coming to say, “We’ve never seen this before where young people are implementing a policy which could have been sitting on the shelf somewhere.” As we speak, in Cameroon we have these young people speaking to young people who have been in armed groups, trying to convince them to drop their arms. And this has become a blueprint in other countries where they want to learn from us.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
How does your experience in working to avoid violence translate to more mundane forms of conflict resolution, of the sort project leaders encounter when leading a team?
CHRISTIAN LEKE ACHALEKE
Working on peacebuilding has been very transformative in terms of my project management and my leadership. And this is because peacebuilding on its own, it’s a set of habits, tools, beliefs that encompasses to what will prevent conflict. I learned how to be a leader, not a boss, because of the peacebuilding tools because even within work, we try to avoid conflict as much as possible because it might obstruct deliverables.
So in terms of my leadership style, communication is top of my priority. In terms of accepting diversity, in the place of work, you could have someone with different religion, different race or whatsoever, and in terms of peacebuilding, these are core things that we must uphold because peacebuilders are impartial. We listen and are solution-oriented. In terms of managing risk and fear, sincerely, my work within conflict prevention and working in conflict hotspots, speaking to former terrorists and others has really taught me about how to deal with my internal fear, how to accept colleagues in terms of their challenges and what they go through, how to work on my security level in terms of personal and in terms of institutional. It has also really raised my ability of being attentive. How to avoid being compromised, how to manage anger. These are the things that I’ve learned because my work exposes me to them.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
What skills are you seeing rising leaders bring to project management today? How are they influencing how projects are being run.
CHRISTIAN LEKE ACHALEKE
One of them is being able to embed information technology into project[s]. I started this 15 years ago, and I could really see how before it used to work. What we’ve seen is that young leaders now bring in a lot of these tools to facilitate, using social media platforms in the most appropriate ways, and being able to mobilize their peers using information technology.
Another thing which I think young people bring to the table, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, is the fact that their leadership gets to speak to their peers. In our context, young people make up over 70 percent of the country’s population. So, young people in the game, in terms of leadership now, has shifted perspective in terms of attracting other youths who want to engage in initiatives and activities, youth who want to become entrepreneurs, and others because they see their peers doing it.
And in terms of innovation and risk-taking, in business and social sector, there’s always the importance to dare. We are seeing continuously how young people are coming in with more daring and calculative approaches, which gives us an opportunity to maximize success of the work that we do.
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STEVE HENDERSHOT
You heard at the top of this episode from Lovy Bhatia, sharing how rising leaders use innovative thinking to forge a better tomorrow. Lovy’s very familiar with creating her own path—she started her career as a software engineer but realized her true calling was leading teams. She spent several years at Airbnb in India, her work spanning operations, compliance, tech and innovation. Now, Lovy is at Amazon in London and shares a few leadership tips she has gained over her career.
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STEVE HENDERSHOT
When you made that jump from coding to leading projects, what were some skills or areas where you saw you needed to grow?
LOVY BHATIA
When you’re doing a particular job or you have something which is fixed and which is streamlined, you’re just responsible for that work. But, with project[s], there are so many people associated with it. So, even if one leg is not performing well, it is your responsibility to make sure that wherever it is lacking, you are the one who is responsible for the overall success. There is a big piece of stakeholder management. You have to have great interpersonal skills for that also because [at the] end of the day, it is the people who are working with you. You need to understand where they’re coming from, and especially in today’s world. Everything doesn’t go by books, so you have to be pretty agile.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
When you’re working with cross-functional teams, how do you make sure everyone stays aligned?
LOVY BHATIA
For me, my leadership style is very participative. I feel everybody has a seat at the table. Even if it is different teams and there are different pieces they’re working on, make sure that you collaborate and come together. And for me, it is very important to take all the pieces of work, create value, and then celebrate and collaborate as one team. Even if it is [an] individual contributor’s work, you should always go back and tell them that whatever they have done has added to what [the] organization’s vision and mission is.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
As a collaborative leader, I imagine your natural inclination is to work to a high degree of consensus. And there can be times when stakeholders want diametrically opposite things. How do you find that optimal level of agreement across stakeholders?
LOVY BHATIA
Every organization has a five-year goal or a year goal or a six-month goal. So, whatever I’m doing, I first align that with the bigger goals of the organization. Then I try to break it down: who would be happy about what we are doing and who would not be happy about what we are doing. And I take care of both the stakeholders in a way that the people who are happy about [the project], just telling and sharing the value we’re making and the progress we are making, and the people who are not happy about [the project], just making sure that I listen to what they have to say, their queries, and try to answer all that, what we are doing. And try to, again, take them to my vision of mapping it to the organization’s bigger goals.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Speaking of collective goals, you joined Airbnb as it was building its operations in India and developing its vision for operations there. What was that experience like?
LOVY BHATIA
Airbnb was very high-paced, and companies like that are still in the process of acquiring customers, understanding customers. Every day it was like a new day, and we were building things from scratch. When I was working with the company, it was shaping me, and I was shaping the company. You felt that you’re doing something which is a valued addition to the company, and you could see it because the company’s in an initial stage, and they’re doing something from the scratch. So, even if we build something which was as small as a team of 10 people who were just reviewing the experiences, it was a big deal. You could feel it, and everything is celebrated.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
You were also leading multidisciplinary teams, not always in your area of expertise—you worked on projects in innovation and helped build out the center of excellence. What was different about leading projects in subjects you weren’t always so familiar with?
LOVY BHATIA
It was the confidence of doing things your way. You’ve [been] given a clean slate, and there is nothing to go back to in the sense that there’s nothing to compare. There was no playbook. So, for me, it was like make your own playbook and you learn on the way. I did not compare it with anything which I have done in the past. I would take risks. And I think the main focus when you’re doing something which is new is [to] become a problem-solver. Any organization, any team, what are you doing [at the] end of the day? You’re solving problems, so I think if you develop a skill of problem-solving, you can be successful anywhere.
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STEVE HENDERSHOT
There’s plenty of inspiration in this year’s Future 50, and I encourage you to visit PMI.org/Future50 to meet the other honorees. It’s clear that with this group of rising leaders and others like them, the next generation of project teams is in excellent hands.
NARRATOR
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