What do you want to be when you grow up? A PMO?
Welcome back!
So let’s start with the first step. It’s what I call “what do you want to be when you grow up” it’s part of the formula outlined in the first post. Here we focus on the P…people in the People + Motivation = Opportunity formula.
I believe if we know what we want we have a really good chance of getting it. However in my opinion we as project managers often don’t really know what we want. We may feel we know but we really don’t. So how do you find out? Easy. Answer this question “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
As Lewis Carroll famously said “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
We don’t want to follow those roads! Just as successful businesses do, we all need a personal vision. But if you don’t have a personal vision … one answer to “What you do want to be when you grow up?” is that you run the risk of a professional road trip to nowhere. Or you just wake up one day to realize that you are in a place that you do not want to be.
So how to do it? Think of what you will be doing or want to be doing in 10 years, yep, I said 10 years. You can and will get there but also think through some interim steps…. look out 3 years then 6 then 10. Ok got the spot!
Now think of what it is like? What is going on? What are you doing? What have you accomplished? What skills and values have you used? How does it feel?
Dare to dream, BIG. As you were thinking of the questions and dreaming how wonderful things will be in the future you may have had a number of possibilities flow over you. You need to acknowledge, distil and focus them to create your future personal vision.
Your vision, in my opinion should include the when, the why and the how. As an example your personal vision may be “By the time I am 35 I will be recognised as one of the top 10 PMs by consistently providing value to my stakeholders and clients”. Remember that was just an example but fact is you could start planning how to achieve such a statement today couldn’t you?
Carl Sergeant, PMP, brings an entrepreneurial, results-based focus to his consulting and presenting practice based on more than three decades of project, program and portfolio management experience.
Carl Sergeant can be contacted at 1 905 466 7778 or [email protected]
