Mastery Point

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In the realm of professional project managers, individuals exhibit two major types of progression through their early years. The first group is what I’ve heard termed “pareto learners.” You may be familiar with the Pareto principle, also well-known as the 80/20 principle. These are the people that focus on learning 20% of the skills used by professional project managers to get noticed quickly. They tend to celebrate their successes quite demonstratively while simultaneously pointing out that they have surpassed their peers in abilities. This is, of course, a clever facade of smoke and mirrors. Left to manage multiple projects with varying complexity long enough and their true skill level becomes quite self-evident. Unfortunately, these types have a knack for getting the attention of executives who have a similar level of experience, or lack thereof, and moving along to other opportunities quickly.

The second group consists of people that have set their sights on skills mastery. These are the types of professionals that seek to sharpen the saw on each skill through precision project management. They value an honest assessment of their weak points. They tend to be life-long learners. The “skills mastery” crowd are honest about their failures and setbacks. They tend to find the lessons that can be learned by each obstacle and opportunity placed before them.

In my career, I’ve seen both types over and over again. The pareto learners aren’t difficult to identify. They carry similar traits. They boast experience and expertise, but rarely started and finished multiple projects at the same company. They jump from role to role and company to company at a rate that could never possibly allow for total understanding of the scope of each role. Upward is their goal. The ladder in their career is made to climb, not learn from each step. In so many cases, I’ve watched executives of this type promote this type of person to the PMO leadership role.

The “skills mastery” types tend to make it to senior or director levels in one area at a time. This is the kind of person that has 10+ years in engineering, project management, continuous improvement, quality, etc. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to seek improvement in their own skills with greater interest than in managing the overall process. If they are lucky enough to work for a manager that understands the value of expanded experience and can coach them to become leaders, they become one of the most valued members of the team.

The real trouble sets in when a pareto learner is leading a group of skills masters. They cannot see the value that they have in their team. They start tightening the yearly bonuses and salaries to lower their costs at the expense of alienating their best team members. They hire ineffectual and inexperienced newbies with no understanding of how to train them to carry their own portfolio. Once the company finally realizes that the manager can’t fulfill the promises they’ve been making or said manager jumps ship to another company, the problem has already tainted the morale of the team.

The algorithm of successful project delivery has a multitude of variables. If your best team members have started to leave faster than you can train suitable replacements, let Mastery Point help you wrap a tourniquet on the bleeding with our project management services.