Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

This best-practice technique can continuously and dramatically improve your leadership effectiveness.

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

When your day ends, the dust settles and you can see the results of your efforts and actions, what picture emerges? Is it clear and concise? Does it support a vision? Or is it fuzzy, in disarray and lacking conviction?
Here's a technique that can help you grow your leadership skills and become more effective today than you were yesterday—and even more effective tomorrow than you are today.
At the start of each workday—when you are at your freshest—spend a few quiet moments reflecting both on your noteworthy achievements from the day before as well as on your "missed opportunities." Make two lists: the top three things that you did that made a difference for the best and the top three things you did (or failed to do) that made a difference for the worse.
Assess your performance and contributions along three axes: leading, sustaining and impairing. Compare the state of things at the start of yesterday with the end of yesterday. Your day's activities include a broad range of areas to reflect upon such as commitments, relationships, morale, costs, quality and the client. Based on your deliberate actions, ask yourself what things are:

• Noticeably Better
• At Their Current Momentum
• Noticeably Worse.

Of course, you hope that what you did yesterday caused events, activities or situations to noticeably improve, on balance, from where they began. In other words, as a leader, were you the catalyst for positive change for those around you?
If your actions resulted in the middle option—maintaining things at their current momentum—this can be either an OK thing or a bad thing depending on the direction of the momentum: positive or negative. If things are deteriorating, this is obviously not a momentum you want to sustain. In that case, you're looking to lead rather than sustain.
Basing today's actions on yesterday's behavior enables you to adjust via lessons learned. Moreover, this immediate self-assessment can help you recover from missteps while the trail is still warm and deliberate recovery actions can have the most beneficial impact.
Performing the adjustments routinely—preferably each day—can have a strikingly positive impact on your effectiveness as a leader. We often avoid self-assessments, especially if they are routine, because we prefer to avoid any reminders of our so-called "failures." But, as professionals, these self-assessments of our actions are essential for our continued growth, maturity and effectiveness.
Even more powerful, occasionally include a trusted friend or mentor in assessing your past behaviors and discuss how best to apply the resulting lessons to present and future actions. If you and a friend perform this exercise with one another once a week, the positive impact will occur over a relatively short period of time.
This best-practice technique may seem simple but it is disarmingly effective. Routinely applying this technique allows old habits to be questioned and immediately replaced by more effective "new" habits.
I am reminded of a saying by Thomas J. Watson, industrialist, entrepreneur and former chairman of IBM: "Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself."

Neal Whitten, PMP, president of The Neal Whitten Group (www.nealwhittengroup.com), is a speaker, trainer, consultant, mentor, and author in project management and employee development. His books include The EnterPrize Organization: Organizing Software Projects for Accountability and Success and Managing Software Development Projects: Formula for Success.

This material is reprinted from PM Network magazine (August 2004) with permission of the Project Management Institute Headquarters, Four Campus Boulevard, Newtown Square, PA 19073-2399 USA. Phone: (610) 356-4600. Fax: (610) 356-4647. Project Management Institute (PMI) is the world's leading project management association with over 130,000 members worldwide. For further information, contact PMI Headquarters at (610) 356-4600 or visit the web site at www.pmi.org. "PMI" and "PM Network" are trademarks of the Project Management Institute, Inc. © 2004 Project Management Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.

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