This morning I got the best kind of email a project manager could ask for: unsolicited, unexpected praise for a project I’ve been wrangling for a few weeks now.
As I’m building an audience of non-profit and higher ed folks looking to pivot into project management, I would absolutely be remiss not to get the low-hanging fruit out of the way here:
If people are regularly saying things to you like “I thought I was organized until I met you!” — and I know that for many of you, they are — then you might consider a career as a project manager. Remember Buzzfeed quizzes? That would be question one on the “12 reasons to consider a career as a project manager” quiz.
Let’s take a moment to zoom in on another part of that email, though… that piece about “I need to brush up on my organization after working with you!”
I wound up in a meeting with that director after they’d sent that email and I went out of my way to thank them for the email — and also to gently remind (a project manager buzzphrase if ever there was one) them that actually… my job is to be the organized one. That way everyone else gets to relax a bit and focus on their thing.
I work with subject matter experts, directors, and founders specializing in marketing, programming, graphic design, animation, legal, and a half-dozen other fields. And yet, I have never once left a meeting with an animator and thought: wow, they’re good. I should brush up on my animation.
Projects throw things into perspective
If project managers are the ultimate team players, then projects are by extension the ultimate team sport — and the ultimate perspective providers. As you might know, interdependence is one of my guiding values. I think it led me to being a project manager: I believe that we live in a world where we don’t win if we don’t win together, and being able to serve in a career where I get to live that out means a lot to me.
Valuing interdependence is not unique to me: the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr in his Christmas Sermon on Peace said that “before you’ve had breakfast, you’ve depended on half the world”. This is truer today than ever: our teams are remote, distributed across time zones, and sometimes even industries. We have to be able to rely on each other — to take each other’s feedback, and to let it keep us warm… but also, to keep it in perspective.
No one else on my team needs to learn how to be more like me — not if I do a good enough job at it myself. And then, by extension, I don’t need to learn how to be more like anyone else. It would be enough to corner the market on my own skills, dig deeply into them, and then give of them freely. (So it really was the best kind of compliment: makes you feel good about yourself and underscores the guiding values of your life, all in one fell swoop. Thanks, friend!)
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