I was discussing with my current project team the other day what a capable Project Manager (PM) looks like. They said for some of the projects they experienced previously with other PMs, the project would probably have been just as successful, if not more successful, without the PM. Why is this the case? Doesn’t success rise and fall on the shoulders of leadership?

For starters, I don’t like to see myself as a Project Manager. I am a People Manager and cheerleader. My passion doesn’t lie in getting the project to the goal of within schedule and under budget, though that is important. Instead, I hold higher importance on the process of getting the team to a place of ‘I want to take hold of the vision that my PM has given me’.

Before you brush this aside thinking it’s too touchy feely, think again. What’s the point of having all the right tools and methodologies (which I do live by!) but you don’t have a team that is willing to support you in the delivery of the project, because you haven’t provided the support they need in the first place? In my view, support means when someone is struggling, you struggle with them, and when they have a win, you cheer with them.

My role isn’t just about aligning Gantt charts, balancing financials, documenting plans, being a task master, and following PRINCE2. Underlying this, it is about gathering the team, seeing eye to eye, building trust, having the gut feel of when someone needs help and is too afraid to say it, leveling out egos to ensure all are team players, and coming alongside so that it is not a ‘you versus me’ culture, but a ‘what are we doing to make this work together’ culture. In other words, it’s aligning what is in your head to the things of the heart. The things of the heart set the right foundations for a successful project to satisfy the things of the head.

I was at a meeting recently where someone began nearly every sentence with the words ‘with respect’.  The topic was fairly contentious, and so I suspected the intent was to diffuse any tension. But after a couple of hours relentless use, even I had to wonder whether it was a habit the user had become unaware of, or whether in fact it was being used to indicate a lack of respect.

In legal practice many years ago, I recall waiting for a matter to be heard by a Supreme Court registrar. Another practitioner, after an altercation with the registrar on a missing document, finally began a new sentence with the words ‘With respect…’ The registrar fixed the practitioner with a steely look, flipped the case file to the associate and said ‘matter dismissed’. While there were grounds for the matter to be dismissed, I’m sure the ‘with respect’ phrase sealed the practitioner’s fate. The sub-text to the registrar was ‘you’re wrong’.

And that’s how it began to sound in the meeting. The sub-text began to play each time the person spoke – ‘you are wrong and I’m going to explain why’.

So a word of warning: be aware of phrases you use frequently, take care in using them, and understand the meaning of them in particular contexts. You may be saying more than you realise.

So much of the strength of web 2.0 tools is the ability to connect and communicate that they provide to the individual. That’s right, the individual. So is that a natural conflict right there, with many of the objectives and policies in most organisations?

When you look at how most intranets (and one could argue, organisations) are structured and managed, there’s a common theme.

Control.

Sure, there are risk and compliance elements to that formality, but much of it stems from the best of intentions to manage messages carefully and well. Organisations like to minimise chaos and that extends to information and communication.

But the fundamental element of a social network is the individual. Being an individual. Funnily enough, that’s really how we work as well, but it seems that once it’s captured, written down, shared, stored and so on, everyone gets nervous.

So in an organisation with a fairly conservative culture, there’s your first challenge in proposing any social networking tools.

There are ways to carve out space to raise the level of comfort about what the tools will really do, and demonstrate how to manage the risk. But it’s not really about the tools. Not to start with at least.

Adopting the Microsoft ‘eat your own dogfood’ motto, I presented to our Frame partners on Web 2.0 yesterday. The focus of the presentation was whether business really needs to take notice of Web 2.0 – or Enterprise 2.0 – tools. Does the hype and activity on the internet translate to corporate environments?

One of the key questions that came after the session was ‘is this just one more thing we need to do?’

I’ve been in line management roles, working long hours and wondering how I’m going to get it all done. So pronouncements from 60,000 feet about a new way of working never excited me. And if they lacked real detail, more often than not they were simply irritating.

Understanding this quite common perspective was fundamental to delivering a knowledge management solution to a client. We communicated an important guiding principle: knowledge management activities had to be part of the way we worked. Not additional. Not an afterthought. Embedded. Replacing some other way of working, to real advantage for the individual.

Of course this means that your customer base is highly segmented. No one size fits all solution. And that’s where many of the web 2.0 tools assist – they are hugely flexible in how they can be used.

So a customer service team might agree to move most of their updates, previously emailed out to team members – onto a blog.

A team leader might blog answers to any questions they are asked. There are several benefits to this: they are stopping the email trail (which would probably only grow and pull in more people), they are capturing valuable knowledge about an issue – their response – and putting it somewhere searchable, they are providing the answer to a wider audience than just the person who asked the question.

Our answer to our audience then was no, adopting web 2.0 tools was not one more thing they needed to do. The tools open up new ways of working, but care and effort needs to be expended on designing those new ways.

Interesting article from Steve Hodgkinson in MIS Australia this month, on what’s new in public sector IT.

He documents the ‘storms’ he sees coming in public sector IT.  There are eight in total, but it is interesting to see two in particular: Collaboration and content management, and Enterprise 2.0.

The first is about providing better, more integrated tools to ‘knowledge workers’ for creating, storing and sharing information.

This is one of the key issues that knowledge management has struggled with. When a great deal of effort is spent working out what should be captured, who should be connected and what should be shared, the result is often a detailed business case proposing a highly structured KM solution. This needs substantial time and effort to engage people in using it and drive the right behaviours.

We talk about breaking down organisational silos for our employees, and yet we give them tools such as KM repositories, shared drives and email that place all their information into, guess what, silos!

The second is the opportunity of Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 tools are very strong for a number of reasons – they are democratic, have a low or non-existent barrier to entry, are quick for the user to engage with and contribute to, can be economical to deploy even within the firewall, are very agile (can grow and change quickly) and are easily embedded in the users’ desktop, ie one click away on the corporate web.

Properly deployed and supported, they democratise information, making more of it more widely available. So they can play a key role in connecting people up and down hierarchies and across organisational teams.

So for any organisation looking to cut costs, they provide great potential. But as we’ve cautioned before, deploying them is not primarily a technology project.

It’s the old ‘what am I buying when I go to the hardware’ example. I might look like I’m buying a drill, but what I’m really purchasing is a ‘drilled hole’.

Blogs are a bit like that.  And your company implementation might fail if you don’t address why they are really being used, and what needs to be in place to nurture them.

Westpac-er David Backley, speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, was candid about web 2.0 initiatives in his organisation. In relation to blogging, he noted that the technology was too new and management too risk averse at the time.

“Parts of the organisation were too scared to put comments in because they didn’t know what the consequences were,” he said.

So that’s all about culture, isn’t it? And the underlying purpose of a blog. Which is to communicate.

So maybe rolling out blogs is a new communication project, not a technology one?

Bloggers on the web have something they want to say (ego), something they want to share (altruistic), or something they want to sell (commercial). They learn by mistakes and the lack of regulation gives them lots of latitude.

Those models might map to people within a business. But in organisations communication is generally divided, deliberately, into formal and informal.

Formal communication within organisations is handled by a skilled team, and there are good reasons for that. They know how to write and they know what to write. They are in tune with those in the organisation who make the news.

Generally, at worker bee level, I communicate with my team, the people I report to, partners, and maybe some customers. Most of that is done face to face, by phone or by email.

But suddenly you are providing me with a blog that not only captures and retains my communication, but gives me a much wider audience? But I may not be given any more communication training about what I should/can/might/shouldn’t say. And I might not have a very receptive audience, especially in these early days.

This is why the implementation of many web 2.0 tools in organisations continues to challenge. A lot needs to be in place before take-up will be successful.

For any organisation considering an Enterprise 2.0 implementation, we recommend you first understand the conversation that is going on.

Years ago, in another time and place, I had a meeting with a marketing director. With a growing sense of disbelief he went around the table of product managers, asking them for a particular input. When the result was one blank stare after another, he dismissed the team, and then turned to me, as the most senior manager. He was simply furious that his instructions had not been followed.

Now we weren’t all actively trying to sabotage him. We were an enthusiastic and capable team, quite innovative and had been successful in meeting our marketing targets. I tried to explain to him that no one had heard, or understood, his requirement. When not one person had heard the message and delivered to it, something had to be wrong with the original communication.

It took some skill to calm him down. Not only had he not been given the input he wanted, but I was querying his communication style.

Communication starts with people. New and fabulous tools aren’t going to make us all better communicators. I can tweet myself silly but every 140 characters I post may still be unclear, uninteresting, unamusing, self-absorbed, and worse still, boring.

So before you roll any Enterprise 2.0 tools over the top of your organisation, make sure you understand what the communication lines are, who they are between, who they should be between, and what conversations are occurring.

By now you will probably have read or watched Obama’s speech, if indeed you didn’t stay up and watch it. Obama is a talented orator, and with good copy his speeches are moving, inspirational, interesting and uplifting.

So how good was his inauguration speech? That’s up to you to decide. There has been some discussion that, given the almost impossible level of expectation that was beginning to build around him, he pulled back, toned it down.

But for all that, there were a number of things he did extraordinarily well. And these things are relevant to us – from any CEO talking to their people, to any one of us presenting at a conference or to a client.

Let’s start with the person. Obama speaks well. He speaks carefully, it is well paced and his voice is well-modulated (easy to listen to). He has a measured gaze and holds eye contact.When you consider how verbal communication is core to any job we do, acquiring and honing these techniques is valuable.

Then it’s worth looking at the mechanics of the language he uses. He uses active language rather than passive (see http://www.monash.edu.au/lls/llonline/grammar/passive/1.xml for a good description). Passive language is usually impersonal – it is remote from the speaker, often does not tie an action to anyone in particular, and rarely discusses just how things will be implemented. When you read Obama’s speech, there are many active terms: we can, we will, we come, we reject. You’ll be surprised how passive language can creep into a proposal, RFP response, email or a presentation.

Obama also uses simple language. By doing this he has the greatest chance of connecting with the greatest number of people. Once you introduce jargon into any presentation or discussion you run the risk of losing someone in the audience. The words he uses the most in the entire speech are ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’. Very inclusive.

He uses some powerful imagery. He says to those who are corrupt ‘… we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.’ Personal, dramatic and easily visualised. And straight – no ambiguity there.

If we turn to the content of his speech, there is also good discipline at work:

1. Know the purpose: sounds really obvious, doesn’t it? But Obama’s speech is not a one-off, it comes after the campaign and sets the stage for his term. It’s part of an ongoing relationship. So he delivered what the people wanted to hear. He spoke as president, not candidate. He set expectations.
2. Show yourself: of course this depends on the circumstances, but Obama mentioned his father twice. That reinforced a sense of history, and also Obama’s personal relationships. Leadership and your ability to influence is intrinsically tied up with who you are as a person.
3. Themes: be very clear about what you want to cover and structure your speech or presentation accordingly. Obama starts with the challenges, draws on history to show why success is possible, shows people what they personally need to step up to, and describes what success looks like. Simple and amazingly successful.

We all know a lot of work goes into any speech, presentation or proposal, and the law of diminishing returns can easily apply. Too many cooks can turn the best efforts into mush. But some thought about the basics will pay you dividends.