Our Project Management Journey with Dale Carnegie
When I first started at Webspec Design, we had three project managers (PM’s) and 16 employees total. I was answering the phones and writing content, two very important jobs but I have to be honest, I was mostly just trying to absorb what was going on around me. I had no idea what our PM’s did on a day to day basis other than make a lot of phone calls and run back to ask the devs a question, let alone what our creative process entailed.
Fast forward two years and two more positions at Webspec and here I sit, a senior project manager and the director of our search engine optimization (SEO) team. We now have six project managers and a staff of 32. For a web company that was a startup not more than a decade ago, this has been a universe altering shift for our process and workflow that has been fascinating to watch.
An interesting thing happened when I updated my title to project manager; I have been getting at least one LinkedIn email a week saying “Check out these new Project Management jobs near you!” Don’t worry, Jeremiah, I’m not going anywhere. Most of these tend to be for construction or engineering firms – which always makes me think about why I would get solicited to work in these positions. I work in web design and SEO, not in construction, how could LinkedIn be so stupid? Obviously there are different types of Project Managers, but the things that construction or engineering PM’s would need to know seem drastically different than what we deal with in web design and marketing, right? The thing I have learned in the last year as a PM is that whether you are project managing for a construction company, a web agency, or a startup, it is not really about the projects themselves. The thing that ties project management together across all industries is the people you manage – both clients and team members.
Enter Dale Carnegie and The Rules
This spring, as we decided to add our sixth PM to our team, we embarked on a journey with a business consultant to help our department learn how to adapt to our rapidly expanding team and workload. I went into the first meeting thinking we were going to be doing something relatively pointless like reading a textbook about project management tactics or talking about how to integrate Agile into our daily workflow (a blog for another day). Instead, they showed up with an old book that smelled reminiscent of my elementary school library and we started to talk.
We spent the summer with Dale Carnegie and his famous 1936 book How to Win Friends and Influence People. Much to my surprise, it had nothing to do with project management, at least not specifically. I suppose we successfully learned how to win friends and influence people. The important part of these exercises and meetings was determining who these “friends” and “people” truly were on a given day. Through this process, the unique thing I learned about Webspec was that friends and people, clients and team members, were often treated as one in the same. We focus on partnerships, not just with our clients but also with our coworkers, and this is what makes managing custom projects both challenging and rewarding.
As we worked through the rules together – Dale really loves his rules – we began to see how these would help to refine our process and tackle the mountain of new work that seems to always be confronting us. There were several specific rules that helped better define our project management process in what I liked to call Webspec Design 2.0.
Rule 1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
This (correct me if I’m wrong!) one might seem a little obvious or unnecessary since we deeply care about our coworkers and clients at Webspec and did so before we started this process, however, I think it brings up an important piece of the project management puzzle that is easy to take for granted. Whether it’s my creative team or my client, in order for the project to be successful it is vital for a project manager to show a genuine interest in what each person brings to the project. The importance of taking the time to learn the values of the company we’re working with and learning to appreciate each team’s strengths and weaknesses is the key to our creative process and has helped carve out a place for each team member and client we work with.
Rule 4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
Whether I am talking to a client or a member of my creative team, the best thing I can do in any given situation is to just listen. This can be difficult depending on the day – I’m an Aries and naturally like to be in charge – but as a team we have found that if you let people talk long enough you will eventually find out exactly what they need from you and what they are looking for.
Rule 5. Talk in terms of the other man’s interests.
Our job is to decipher what each client needs for their custom project; sometimes this is straightforward and sometimes this is like scaling the side of Mount Everest. Since every project is different, our main priority is to make sure we fit our client’s needs and, more importantly, the needs of their users. As the project manager, my role is to translate what the team is saying into terms that the client, and their users, will be able to relate to. We cannot effectively do this without first appreciating what our clients find interesting.
Rule 8. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.
This rule comes in handy when collaborating with people, friends, clients, and coworkers. We have such a “large” team now and everyone is very vocal about their opinions, which is both a blessing and a curse in an office as small as ours. My entire day is communicating with people who have different opinions or perspectives on things. Of all the lessons in this book, this one is the most obvious, yet the most useful one we learned. We are taught as children to not judge another man without walking a mile in his shoes, but after a complicated or difficult meeting this can be a challenge to remember. Through this process, we’ve learned that the best way to project manage is to be flexible and think about things primarily from your team member’s or client’s perspective. Not only does this get things done more efficiently, but it also broadens our views of a project or our process.
Some of these rules sound a little cliche and may or may not belong on a motivational poster, but the purpose of the exercises we went through this summer becomes more obvious the more we move through our process this fall. In the last six months, we’ve successfully integrated three new project managers into the group, continued to refine our scoping and proposal process, and redefined our definitions of collaboration with our clients. All because we met a man named Dale.
