For project managers aiming to improve their project planning and drive successful outcomes, this episode provides practical advice and real-life examples. Focusing on the distinction between conversation and communication, Clint Padgett shares strategies for fostering trust and accountability through authentic dialogue and offers insights on creating adaptable, realistic project plans. Clint emphasizes the importance of in-person team meetings to secure buy-in and boost project success.
Chapters
00:00 … Intro
02:28 … Meet Clint
04:53 … Running the Torch
06:23 … Elements of Project Planning
08:48 … Network Diagrams and Conversations
10:58 … Punitive vs Helpful
12:08 … Flexible Project Plans
16:15 … Team Involvement in Planning Process
18:25 … Getting Buy-In from Your Team
20:18 … Building a Visual Map
23:10 … In-Person Team Meeting
24:41 … Resistance from a Sponsor to Invest
26:03 … Communication
30:18 … Virtual Conversation Limitations
32:59 … Balancing Communication vs Overcommunication
36:06 … Ideal Team Players
39:04 … A Superintendent or a PM?
40:28 … Clint’s Books
41:56 … Get in Touch
44:12 … Closing
CLINT PADGETT: And what we found is I can do a two-year project remote, as long as that first three days is together face to face. That’s where we form the connections and the bonds that allow us to go remote for the rest of the project.
Intro
WENDY GROUNDS: You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me is the expert in project management, Bill Yates. We love having you join us twice a month to be motivated and inspired by project stories, leadership lessons, and advice from industry experts from all around the world.
BILL YATES: Velociteach is a community of hard-working team members, here to support your growth and success. InSite is our project management mobile learning platform where you can prepare for your PMP certification, or get better at your job by choosing from over 70 high quality and engaging courses. These courses cover a variety of topics such as communication, leadership, status reporting, the work breakdown structure. Each course aligns with a PMI Talent Triangle, making earning PDUs easier than ever. Visit us at velociteach.com today to get started.
WENDY GROUNDS: Today we have the privilege of speaking with Clint Padgett. Clint is the CEO and President of Project Success Incorporated. He’s a Forbes Books author and the host of The Conversation with Clinton M. Padgett podcast. With over 25 years of experience and a background in electrical engineering, Clint has guided some of the world’s top companies in achieving remarkable project success. And he’s going to tell us a really interesting story about one of the top companies that he’s worked for and how he got involved in the Olympics.
Project planning, conversation versus communication, and team involvement in the planning process are topics that are on the books for today. We’ll be diving into Clint’s tried-and-true process for project planning and methods to keep projects on track without compromising on quality or performance when those challenges arise.
This episode is packed with actionable advice. Stay tuned as we get into all of this and more with Clint Padgett.
Hi, Clint. Welcome to Manage This.
CLINT PADGETT: Hi. It’s so nice to be here.
WENDY GROUNDS: I am really excited that you’re in the studio.
CLINT PADGETT: Yes, me, too.
WENDY GROUNDS: And that we get to see you face to face. It’s always exciting for us to have a guest right here with us.
CLINT PADGETT: I’m a huge believer in face-to-face connections being made.
BILL YATES: We’re going to talk about that.
Meet Clint
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah, I think that’s going to come up. Glad we could do this. Before we get into the topic, let’s hear a little bit about your experience, how you became a project manager. And I’ve heard you’ve done some work for the Olympics, quite a lot in fact. Could you tell us about that?
CLINT PADGETT: So, my route here was circuitous, as most people’s routes in their work life is; right? Right out of high school I went in the Navy because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. I spent six years in the Navy as an electrician’s mate on an aircraft carrier. So, you spend seven days a week, six months at a time at sea, and you work 12-hour shifts except the days you work 16 hours a day, which is three days in a row. Then you work 12 three days in a row, and just rinse and repeat for six or seven months. So, I thought there’s probably something better to do with my life than this.
So, I got out of the Navy and went to work in a shipyard. And I can promise you there’s no greater motivation to go to college than to work in a shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia in December/January, which is exactly what I was doing. Every day I’m walking into the shipyard, the wind is cutting right through you because, if you don’t know, Norfolk is cold in the wintertime. And I thought after two months of this, there’s definitely got to be something better in my life than this. Suddenly college sounds like maybe a pretty good idea. So, I was lucky enough to get accepted to Georgia Tech. And I have a double degree from Tech, and an MBA from Duke University.
And then my first job post-college, I walked across the street. If you’re not familiar with Atlanta, Georgia Tech’s on one corner, and the opposite corner is Coca-Cola Company.
BILL YATES: That’s right.
CLINT PADGETT: And I spent six years at Coke as a sales equipment engineer, and what happened was the Olympics got awarded to Atlanta in 1994. I really wanted to work on that project, and I knew that Project Success was going to be having the contract for that. So, I left Coke and went to work for Project Success, and I went back to Coke as a contractor basically working for Project Success on the Olympics to execute against Coke’s activations of the Olympics. We have been partnered with Coca-Cola, helping them activate their worldwide sporting events since 1992. So, we’ve done all of the Summer and Winter Olympics since ‘92 for them, and then all the EUROs since 1998, also the FIFA World Cups since ‘98.
So, event-wise I probably have planned about 30, 35 major worldwide sporting events for Coca-Cola. I’ve personally been involved in all the Olympic projects except for two since ‘94, since I joined the company in ‘94, ‘96 Olympics being my first one with Atlanta. And then I missed the one in Beijing, and I missed the one in Vancouver. But as a company, we’ve done them all since ‘92. So, I’ve done a lot of planning for Olympic events, Summer and Winter Olympics, all the worldwide sporting events.
Running the Torch
And then, kind of the capstone was I was over in Milan. We were planning the upcoming Winter Olympics. And again, for Coca-Cola, to be very clear. I don’t work for the Olympic Committee. I work for Coca-Cola, planning their activation of it. And I was able to stick around, and I got to run the torch in France.
BILL YATES: That’s so cool.
WENDY GROUNDS: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
CLINT PADGETT: Back in June of this year.
BILL YATES: Wow.
CLINT PADGETT: So, yeah, it was pretty amazing. I think I’m still floating on cloud nine.
BILL YATES: That is awesome. You did not drop it.
CLINT PADGETT: I did not drop it.
BILL YATES: Right.
CLINT PADGETT: It’s not as if – they prep you and say, “Oh, it’s super heavy. It’s super heavy.” It’s not. Either that or you just don’t realize. It’s just you’re such a cloud nine, it’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences. We’re in Angouleme, which is a small town, but the streets were lined with people, and everybody’s cheering you on.
And then the person before you comes up, and you do what’s called a “torch kiss” where they have the flame, and then you touch your torch to it. Your torch lights. Then you run your 300 meters, whatever it is, and then you do the torch kiss to the next person. And it was really cool because the person handed off to me was a Coke employee that I’ve known for a long time. And then the person I handed it off to actually was an Olympic athlete from a previous event.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: So that was just a really surreal experience. They tell you don’t even run because you end up running too fast. They say just walk. If we’re behind schedule, we’ll let you know. So, it’s more like the Olympic torch walk. But it’s a super, super cool experience, for sure.
BILL YATES: That’s so cool. You want to savor every step, yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: You do.
WENDY GROUNDS: That’s a good story. We’re huge Olympics fans.
BILL YATES: Yes.
WENDY GROUNDS: So, it’s good to hear that side of it. It’s amazing how much organization and project planning goes into something like that.
BILL YATES: yeah.
Elements of Project Planning
WENDY GROUNDS: So, let’s just take that further into project planning, and discuss your process for project planning and the key elements that you would include in a realistic project plan.
CLINT PADGETT: I think our take, just a little bit different, is we think people are important. Process is great, and you’ve got to have process to be successful. And our process, what we call the “project success method,” is based on the critical path method, which was built in the ‘50s, right, developed in the ‘50s by I think two different – simultaneously. I think one was the government, and I think Raytheon or somebody came up with the other one at about the same time. So, our process is based on that.
But I think our secret sauce is we believe strongly that people are the reason you’re going to be successful because, look, software, whether you use Primavera or Microsoft Project, they’ll help you with the process side. If you don’t know a process, it’s basically task A takes five days, followed by B takes 10 days, followed by C takes five days. Project is 20 days. Microsoft will help you with that. Microsoft doesn’t help you with the fact that Bob does activity A, and Jill does activity B, and Susan does activity C, and they’re motivated in different ways. They have different work schedules. So, we feel very strongly about bringing the people in to collaborate on a project.
So, our process basically, we want to bring you into a room, not really, but kind of virtually lock the door for two or three days, and over that two or three days clearly define what’s in the project through a charter document. And then I like to say I want you to argue with me at that point. If you have a disagreement, let’s get it on the table now, as opposed to having it fester, and you leave the room not believing, you know, that we’re going in the right direction. Let’s talk about it. Let’s get it on the table. And let’s have a conversation, basically.
And then once we’ve aligned what we want to do, and then make sure that matches what our customer actually wants, because I’ve had a situation where the customer was in the room, and after an hour he stood up and said, “I was hoping you would get there, but you’re not. This is not what I want.”
BILL YATES: Ooh.
CLINT PADGETT: “This is not it at all. I want something different, completely different.” And we’ve got to make sure we align with what the customer wants. So, once we know that, then we move into the planning phase. We plan, and again, in a collaborative way, in a face-to-face situation like this one would be. And maybe there’s 30 people or 40 people, or maybe just five people. And we plan each of what we call the work streams. But we plan each deliverable, and people have to identify their activities.
And the way I think about it is, once we’ve done the charter, if I’m the IT person on the project, then I know these are the tasks I need to get done for that project to be successful. And if I’m the procurement person on the project, I say, well, if that’s the project, then here are my tasks.
Network Diagrams and Conversations
And then we together build a model of the project, which for those of you who are familiar with project management, you know, we call a “network diagram” or a “node diagram.”
If you used Project back in the day, they incorrectly called it a PERT chart. They have now corrected it. Now it’s called a network diagram. But that’s just a visual model of your project. And it just shows a sequence of events. And the reason we do it in a collaborative way – and by the way, this is old school paper on the wall. We put Post-it notes up, and we draw arrows to indicate sequencing.
And we do that because it forces a conversation yet again to happen, which is a recurring theme throughout what I’m going to say today is we believe strongly in conversations. So, we have conversation about who owns this. And it’s always amazing to me how people will think somebody else owns something, and they say, no, you own it. But at the end of the session, there’s one owner on the task. We know exactly who owns it, and they’ve agreed to take it, as well.
And then we have a duration on each task, as you guys would know. And again, that’s a conversation. I like to joke about it and say that, when I teach a class – and let’s say there’s 50 people in the class. Invariably, if there’s 50 people in the class, there’s at least two who clearly don’t want to be there. And the only reason they’re in the class is because their boss said, go take this project management class.
BILL YATES: Somebody said they have to.
CLINT PADGETT: And they walk into the room, and I can just see – it’s written on their face. They’re just like, project management, just one more way for the man to keep me down; right?
BILL YATES: Yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: Project management equals micromanagement in their brain. And that’s not the point of project management. It is a forecasting tool that’s going to allow us to predict today, with all the uncertainty on the project, whether or not we can hit a deadline that’s 18 months in the future.
BILL YATES: Yup.
CLINT PADGETT: Or for me, on a lot of the work that I do, it’s two years in the future, with a lot of variability and say, can we hit that or not? And so, I think for us it’s really important to get people in the room to have that conversation, to force those discussions to happen. And typically for us, it’s about three days. At the end of our three-day session, we have a plan the team built, underline that the team built, and it’s their plan for their project. Right? It’s got to be that way. Otherwise, you know, the project manager may be the smartest person about the project, but they’re not doing all the work. So, they need to make sure the team is the one developing the plan because, end of the day, they’re the ones doing it.
BILL YATES: They have to own it.
Punitive vs Helpful
CLINT PADGETT: And I think the other thing I’d like to talk about, and when people don’t want to be in the room, it’s because their whole life experience has been project equals punitive. You know, when you do project management, it’s been used as a punitive tool against them; right?
So, they walk into the room, it’s like they roll their eyes and say, “Oh, project management. What that means is that Joe is going to go over here in the corner by himself and build the task list without my input. And then he’s going to use a random number generator to assign direction because he’s not going to ask me how long it would take. He’s going to build it into a plan, which I have no input into, and then beat me over the head with it because they’re not meeting the dates and, worse, tell my boss I can’t do my job.”
If that’s project management, then I would want to run from the room screaming…
BILL YATES: Yeah, me, too.
CLINT PADGETT: …as well, because that’s not. Project management to me should not be punitive. It should be helpful. And helpful is, if I can tell you that I know there’s 97 things on your to-do list for this project, but over the next two weeks there’s only three. But you’ve got to get these three done.
BILL YATES: Focus.
CLINT PADGETT: And the other 87, they’ve got this technical thing called Slack on them. They can move a little bit. But these three, if you’re late on these, we’re going to miss the Olympics. We’re going to miss the launch date of whatever this new product is or, you know, some big event.
Flexible Project Plans
BILL YATES: Clint, one of the things that’s true about projects is challenges are going to happen. Life will happen. Real-world stuff will happen. When you think about that, what advice do you have for project managers for practical steps they can take to ensure their plans stay flexible? So, when real-world challenges happen, they’ve got it?
CLINT PADGETT: I think you keyed the right word there, “flexibility”; right? sometimes people think about project work, they think of project work as the terms that come to mind are rigid and flexible. And I see this all the time. They’ll go, “So, you know, come on, Clint. I’m inventing something that doesn’t exist in the world today, and you’re going to want to fit me in this box.” No. There’s a structure to it, but it doesn’t have to be rigid and inflexible.
So, the way we handle that is we do a couple things. First of all, we have one of our ground rules is you must be able to change your duration later if you get better information. And so, I always ask the people in the room, whether I’m teaching a class or actually planning a project, “How familiar does this story sound to you?” And I’ll say, “And I work for Acme Corporation.” And I always joke that, if you’re of a certain age, you know that Acme Corporation is who the Coyote bought all the stuff to get the Roadrunner. It never works; right? And if you don’t know about that, you know, that’s okay. It’s not germane to the story.
But if I work for Acme Corporation, and we have a planning process, and then we have this beautiful network diagram which is the overall flow of the project, and the project manager picks an activity in the very middle and says, “Clint, what’s the duration on this?” And I’m thinking, “Well, I don’t know. When does it start?” Because when it starts will impact the duration. If it’s next week, it’s a different duration than it will be in three months, when two of my projects end.
And the project manager says, “Well, I don’t know when your activity is yet, so just give me your best guess, and you can change it later.” But having worked at Acme Corporation for 17 years, I know what really happens is whatever number I give today I’m not able to change later. And I’m – it’s locked in stone and used to beat me over the head with the remainder of the project.
BILL YATES: For good or bad.
CLINT PADGETT: Yeah, yeah.
BILL YATES: Or, oh, you’re way too high or way too low.
CLINT PADGETT: And so human nature kicks in and says, “Well, I really probably only need a week to do that, but I’m going to give myself two weeks just to make sure I’m safe.” And so, then what happens is, as you were just alluding to, durations become self-fulfilling prophecies. And if I put in two weeks, when I really only wanted one week, but I put in two weeks in the schedule to get myself a buffer, a safety net, how often do I really do it in one week? Never. Because now the schedule says two weeks. And so, I’m going to do it in two weeks.
BILL YATES: Right.
CLINT PADGETT: So that’s not a good thing. We say you have to be able to change your durations later. I’m asking you today at the beginning of a project to give your best estimate for something that has a lot of variability in it in the future. Like, for example, what if you guessed it would take you five days to do your task? And it would have, except you’re in training for three days that week that you didn’t know about when you said five days for that task.
What if you got called to jury duty the week that you’re doing that task? What if you have a sick kid that comes in? I mean, there are all these things that happen. So, you have to be able to change your durations later. So that’s the number one ground rule for flexibility is you can change the duration later. Now, that does not mean that you use a random number generator. They have to be based in some thought process. But you can change them later.
The other thing is we’re going to update the project plan either every week or every other week. And those are your chances to say, “I only thought it would take me a week, but it’s an outdoor activity. It’s actually rained a lot more than I expected. I’m going to need another three days.” So, you’re constantly adjusting the remaining duration or what’s left to make it correct and accurate.
And then the third way we address risk, which is the unknowns. There are a lot of things you could plan for upfront. Right? You could plan for what I call the “known unknowns,” the things you know you don’t know that can, like, debug and rework. But what about the person who gets sick in the middle of a project? You don’t know who it’s going to be or how long they’re going to be out or when they’re going to be out. But if you have a plan, once you find out about the illness, you can look at their plan and say, well, what’s on their plate that actually has to be done, and we can assign to someone else? Or what can actually wait until they come back?
So, I think flexibility is the key. And it’s about making sure that you allow people to change their durations so they don’t sandbag you and just give you these big, huge durations they feel really safe with, and then understand that they can change them later and that you’re going to meet on a periodic basis to update the plan.
Team Involvement in Planning Process
BILL YATES: One of the things that I’m hearing you say right off the bat is involving the team, involving the team, involving the team, both in, you know, understanding the work that we’re going to do, alignment on that scope. Everybody buys into it. And then, okay, it’s not the project manager or one person going off in a room and locking themselves in and coming up with estimates. There’s a lot of back and forth, a lot of collaboration going on there. I like that. What strategies do you use to involve the team in that planning process, and what have you seen in terms of the impact that that has on the success of a project?
CLINT PADGETT: I think it’s huge that they come into the room with you, that it’s not – you don’t send me an email with your two or three or five tasks and say, “Talk to Bob.” No. How about you come to the meeting, and like we are today, face to face. And I think that, I don’t want to get too far afield off the question, but there are some really important points. There was a book that I read early in my career by Jon Katzenbach called “The Wisdom of Teams.” And, you know, I won’t lie. It’s a rough read. But, you know, it’s got some really good information in it.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: And, you know, one of those things is, if you take a group of individuals, and then you want to have them perform as a team, you must put a structure within which they begin to feel accountable to each other.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: And so, in my words, the way I would say that is, I need to convert you from an email address to which I feel no accountability into a living, breathing human being to which I’ve formed a connection. And the best way for that to happen is in a face-to-face meeting. The best way for that to happen for a project is have a two- or three-day planning session where you bring people together. And over those two or three days I’m going to meet you in person. We’re going to probably have a breakfast together, probably have lunch together, maybe a team dinner. I’m going to bump into you on the way to get coffee, we’ll chat.
And over that two or three days and those conversations not about the project, I’ll learn who you are as a person. Oh, Wendy has two kids. I have two kids. Her kids do this. My kids do that. And you’re no longer Wendy@acmecorporation.com. Now you’re Wendy@acmecorporation.com that I formed a connection with. And what we found is I can do a two-year project remote, as long as that first three days is together face to face. That’s where we form the connections and the bonds that allow us to go remote for the rest of the project.
Getting Buy-In from Your Team
WENDY GROUNDS: Taking that further, how do you get the buy-in from your team when you’re presenting the project?
CLINT PADGETT: You mean once they’re in the room.
WENDY GROUNDS: Once they’re in the room, and you’re…
CLINT PADGETT: Oh, it’s great. That point, there’ll be some people that are, this is never going to work. I can’t believe we’re wasting three days. Three days planning is three days’ worth of actual work I could have gotten done. And what I always find is interesting is that those are the biggest converts. At the end of the planning session, they’re like, ooh, we need to do this on all of our projects. Because a couple of things happen that drive the buy-in. One is, yeah, I think I mentioned this one already, but they have to be in the room; right? So, you probably have seen people assign somebody’s name, “Oh, well, that’s Fred. Fred does that task.” Well, where’s Fred? “Fred’s not here today. But that’s okay. Put Fred’s name on it.”
And I won’t do it. Our process says you must be in the room to acknowledge that is your task. You’re taking acceptance of it. That drives buy-in. And only you can give me the duration. So, if Wendy says the duration for her task is 10 days, and her boss walks by and says, sticks his head in and goes, “Wait, 10 days? What is this task, Wendy?” And then looks at me and says, “Clint, she doesn’t need 10 days. She just needs two days.”
Then what I’m going to do is facilitate a conversation at this point. “Wendy, why do you think it’s 10 days?” And Wendy says, “Well, this is not my only project, nor is it my only task in this project. I’ve got training coming up for three days. I’ve got this customer issue you want me to solve. So, it’s going to take, if I was just looking at doing nothing but this task, yeah, maybe it’s two or three days. But I’ve got other things.”
And I look at the boss and say, “Well, why do you think it’s two days?” And he goes, “Well, I didn’t realize that she had the customer issue she’s working on, which that is important.” But what Wendy doesn’t know is we’ve already worked on this in the past, before she joined the company, and there’s some IP that’s already there. She needs to just dust it off and push it across the finish line.
So, I go back to Wendy and say, “Well, Wendy, based on this information, what do you think?” She goes, “I don’t think two days is right, but let’s do six.” So not 10, but actually let’s do six. But at the end of the day, only the person who’s volunteered to own the activity can give me the duration. Nobody else can. That again drives accountability.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
Building a Visual Map
CLINT PADGETT: And then once you start building the map, the visual map, it’s always amazing to me, even after all these years of doing it, we’ll build a map over a two- or three-day period. And if I’m doing one of the big worldwide sporting events, it’s actually three weeks. And we will build a map over three weeks, you know, at different times with different teams in different rooms. Then you have what we call the integration section where you bring everybody back together to do the interconnects.
And people can walk right up to their chart two and a half weeks later, point right at the task they want. They know exactly how it’s connected. And you don’t get that electronically. You get that with your butts in seats, eyeball to eyeball, having those hard conversations. Remember we moved this because we said you wanted to get that done first. And they walk away with a much better understanding of the project as a whole and where they fit into it.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: And all of those things drive accountability.
BILL YATES: Yeah, there’s built-in accountability right there.
CLINT PADGETT: It is. It is. And, you know, it’s so important, going back kind of to the previous question, as well. Let’s say that Wendy is, I’ve only – I’ve known her for eight years, but she’s just Wendy@acmecorporation.com. And I do a lot of different work for the company, and some of that work ends up feeding into Wendy’s. And, yeah, all I know is when I’m done, I email it to Wendy, and Wendy does something, some magic happens, and the product gets launched, and the company makes money. Everybody’s happy; right? And I get a bonus at the end of the year.
But on this particular week, one of my 55 tasks on my to-do list is for Wendy. And it’s Friday, 8:00 o’clock at night. I’ve already put in 60 hours this week. And, you know, I still have a lot of tasks on my plate, including the one for Wendy. I’m like, you know, I don’t feel bad. I did 60 hours this week. I did more than my fair share. It’s not my fault the boss gives me more work than I could possibly ever do. So, I’m just going to get to it next week.
And then next Tuesday or Wednesday, I finally finish the task, email it to Wendy and say, “Wendy, sorry I didn’t get it to you last week, but we had a lot going on. Hope you’re doing well.” Right? And all I know is that Wendy does some magic, and the product launched, and I didn’t feel any pain.
BILL YATES: Right.
CLINT PADGETT: But in these face-to-face planning sessions, we walk back into the room, you know, after we finish the plan and we’re doing the compression session, which is where your product is taking longer than you want it to, and you’ve got to crunch it; right? And so, I’m looking at the critical path, and I say, “Well, this – I don’t think this is right, Wendy, because this says that I feed into you, which is right, but it says I’m on the critical path.
And so, if I was late, the project would be late. I know for a fact in the past I’ve been late, and the project wasn’t late.” And Wendy says, “You’re right, Clint. In fact, last time you were three days late. I remember it vividly because I had to work two weekends in a row to make up for your lateness.”
BILL YATES: Yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: “And I know that Clint has five letters. But at my household for those two weekends, you were a four-letter word because I had to miss my son’s soccer game, my daughter’s recital.” And now I feel bad. You know? I mean, I don’t want somebody else to be the reason I miss a big event in my kid’s life. And so, these conversations and this accountability I feel now towards Wendy is when I am back in my office, even when we are located half a world apart, I’m going to hold myself more accountable to make sure I’m not the reason that Wendy misses another big event in her family life.
In-Person Team Meeting
WENDY GROUNDS: Just a question. So logistically, you’re saying that even if you have some of your team in India and, you know, some the other side of the U.S., you’re bringing them all together physically.
CLINT PADGETT: Yes. And so, people say, “Well, isn’t that – isn’t that expensive?” I don’t know. What does it cost to miss your project deadline by a month? I’m pretty sure the cost of flying people together is insignificant compared to the cost of missing your deadline. You don’t launch your product; you’re missing the sales and the profit you’d make on that product. You miss a regulatory issue, now you’re paying penalties and fines. And so, it is a cost. There’s no doubt about it. The bigger cost probably isn’t the flight. The bigger cost is the team’s time and being locked in a room for three days, that’s the bigger cost. The productivity gain you get out of it going forward after that, you always see a multiple of the investment you make upfront.
So, if you spend three days planning upfront, you’re going to expect to save much more than that on the back end. A lot of my big projects, we start planning them two years in advance for these worldwide sporting events. And usually, we plan two years in advance. And when we finish the project plan and put it in the software, we’re two years late. So, we’ve got four years’ worth of work, and we have two years to get it done.
BILL YATES: Wow.
CLINT PADGETT: And then over the last day of the planning process, we make decisions, work together in a collaborative way through conversations. We compress, we compress, compress. At the end of the day, we’ve got it back to the deadline. And that’s – we made the investment of bringing people together for those two, three days or, in my case, for these big, huge events it’s usually two to three weeks. And of course, you have people come in and out as they need to.
BILL YATES: Yup.
CLINT PADGETT: But, yeah, it’s an investment.
Resistance from a Sponsor to Invest
BILL YATES: Clint, this is such a critical point. And I’m sure there are project managers listening to this that are thinking, okay, I need to go replay this last minute and a half to my boss or to my sponsor.
CLINT PADGETT: Sure.
BILL YATES: Any other advice, any other examples that you’ve had in the past where you’ve had to overcome that resistance from a sponsor to pay to bring people together to kick off an important project?
CLINT PADGETT: You know, it’s – you have to kind of compare and contrast, basically. So, I’ve never not been successful in eventually convincing them that it’s worth the investment upfront. But what has often happened is, like during the pandemic, of course, people weren’t coming face to face. And so, we had to switch over to do things virtually.
And what we found is it took longer to do it virtually. It’s not as efficient. There’s more confusion when you do it virtually because we’re not having this conversation in real time. Now we’re having to figure out what you want and then go back to this person. No, that’s not right. It’s not as efficient, and you don’t get as good an end product.
So, a lot of the stuff you can do virtually. Can you do a charter virtually? Of course you could. Could you do compression virtually? Of course you could. But the building of the plan itself, that part, its best-done face to face. And if you’re going to be face to face anyway, you may as well just tack on a couple of hours for the charter.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: And you already have them in the room, do the compression.
BILL YATES: Yes.
CLINT PADGETT: So, it’s just get them all together. And usually once it happens the first time, they’re sold and go, “This is the way we should do all of our projects.”
Communication
BILL YATES: One of the themes that we’ve been hitting on is conversation over communication.
CLINT PADGETT: Yeah, for sure.
BILL YATES: Talk more about that. I can tell it’s a passion point for you.
CLINT PADGETT: You know, it really is. So, I grew up in South Carolina, and I love being from South Carolina. I think the slogan is “Smiling faces, beautiful places.” Not known for the best educational system in the world. So, you know, I grew up, in my mind I was thinking communication and conversation were the same thing. And then my second book, which was “How Teams Triumph,” I researched, and I learned that communication is I could communicate by sending an email, sending a text message, leaving you a voicemail, posting on Slack or Jira. These are all valid ways of communicating.
Conversation, on the other hand, at least according to Webster’s Dictionary, is the exchange of ideas. It’s not just a one-way communication, it’s an exchange of ideas. And so, by having a conversation, you’re able to ask clarifying questions.
If you ever played the game Telephone when you were a kid; right? If you’re listening, you don’t know this game, Telephone when you’re a kid is one kid has a secret they whisper to the second kid, who then whispers that secret to the third kid, and it just goes down the line, right, five, six kids later. The fun of the game is that what comes out of the last person’s mouth is not remotely close to the secret that got whispered the first time by the first kid.
That happens today in the business world, as well. I think, as a leader, I clearly sent my message across, and yet what happens is not remotely what I wanted. So how did my message get mangled?
It’s the same problem we have with Telephone. It’s the same problem we have in the business world today. And that is when you tell me what you want, I filter that through the way I define terms, my biases, whether I’m having a good or bad day that day, there’s a lot of things that I filter that through. So, you tell me what you want, and then I interpret it the way that I think, and I tell it to the next person, who interprets it through their filters.
And so, it’s not surprising that the message gets mangled. What would make things better is having a conversation where when Wendy says, “Clint, I want you to turn left,” I’ll say, “Okay, Wendy, do you mean left like at this driveway, left at the next intersection, or left at the traffic light? Which left do you mean?” And by asking clarifying questions, the message is clearly delineated to me, and I understand it exactly, or at least in a much closer way to the way you intended it.
So, for us, an exchange of ideas is really important. Everything we do is through a conversation. We document the project, the charter, through a conversation. We build the project plan through a conversation. Who owns this? Are they here? Okay, how long do you need? What do you need? You know, what are the predecessors to this task? What do you need from other people? Let’s draw that. And we compress the schedule through a conversation. Here’s a critical path. Who can give me two days? What can we do differently through a conversation? And then you keep the project up to date every week or every other week by having these meetings where through a conversation you say, “How are you doing? This says you’re going to be done yesterday. Are you finished? No? Okay, when will you finish?”
And if I’m the project manager, I can say, “What can I do to help you?” Is it just a bad duration, or you had a customer issue come up? And maybe it’s not on the critical path, and it doesn’t matter anyway. It could be a little bit late. But it’s also about understanding, as I’m working through these updates, understanding who is habitually late, and maybe we’ll have a conversation and say, “Hey, I notice you’re always late, or you have too much on your plate. How can I help?” Because my job as a project manager isn’t to do the work, it’s to facilitate you getting the work done, fighting the battles for you.
BILL YATES: Yeah. You know, Clint, I’m so behind you on this. Conversations are incredibly helpful. I mean, through a conversation, especially if it’s face to face, I can read you; right?
CLINT PADGETT: Yup.
BILL YATES: I can figure out, what’s your tone of voice? What is your body language telling me? Is it consistent? Does your body language say one thing, but your words are saying something else? Right?
CLINT PADGETT: For sure.
BILL YATES: Yeah, how much confidence does he have in this estimate he’s giving me? How much confidence does he have that this risk event that we’re all afraid of is not going to happen? If we’re face to face, and we’re having those conversations real-time, it’s so much easier to pick up on those, you know, all the other stuff that those words themselves don’t communicate, that come through in a conversation.
CLINT PADGETT: Yeah. 100%. I think to me it’s, you know, if you communicate written, right, then it’s really hard for me to interpret the way you intended them to be said. Right? So, I’m having to interpret your words. And maybe I read them when I’m having a bad day, and I’m mad. And I’m like, “This, I can’t believe they said this.”
BILL YATES: Right.
Virtual Conversation Limitations
CLINT PADGETT: But if I’m having a conversation with you, then I can look you in the eye, and I can see that you’re smiling, you’re nodding, and it wasn’t intended that way. I can actually interpret the words you’re using. So, I don’t think, while I love the Zooms and Teams of the world, they enable us to do a lot of things, but most of the time people don’t have their cameras on. And even if they do have their camera on, I can only see their face. I can’t see all of the below-the-neck stuff that’s going on. And they’re looking down. Is that because they’re on their phone communicating about something completely different, not really paying attention to me? Are they looking up some information they need for the call?
So, I really can’t tell any of that stuff. And that’s why having people in a room face to face is always better. I understand that, after the initial planning session, you’re probably going to do your updates remotely, and that’s okay. But the trade-off always comes that I can’t see below the neck. I can’t see your emotions. Most of the time people have their camera turned off. It just doesn’t foster communication that well. It certainly doesn’t foster a conversation.
I was talking to Dr. Sherry Turkle, who’s a professor at, I believe, MIT. She’s written four books, one of which was “Reclaiming Conversation.” And in that she talked about some studies that were done. Of course we’re doing the call through Zoom. And she says, “Clint, right now, to make you think that I’m looking at you, the research says” – this is what was in her book – “that when you make eye-to-eye contact, there’s a chemical reaction that happens. We form some kind of a bond.” Right? She says, “So to trick you into thinking I’m looking at you,” she says, “I’m looking at my camera, which is way up here, which means I can’t see you down here.”
BILL YATES: Right.
CLINT PADGETT: And so, she says, “And I know you’re doing the same thing. So here we can’t see each other at all, but to visually try to trick us, when we’re face-to-face, I don’t have to trick you. I’m looking right here in the eye, see it all.” And the other thing that doesn’t happen on Zoom is I can see my peripheral vision; something happens way over to the left or way over to the right. But on the Zoom call, I’m only seeing what’s in this little bitty box. And so, in a real session, I can see there’s something happening over here that I can’t really hear, but I know I need to stop for a minute and look over and say, “Hey, what’s going on over here?” You don’t see that in a Zoom call.
WENDY GROUNDS: We’ve talked a bit about that before, about looking when you’re on the Zoom call. And I just find it so much easier to look at the picture of the person. And I think they’re most of the time doing the same thing.
BILL YATES: Yes.
WENDY GROUNDS: We’re not making any eye contact.
CLINT PADGETT: For sure. Now what I’ve done to solve that problem is I have a teleprompter. So now there’s a device, it’s a monitor that I feed into, and it puts your face up on the teleprompter screen. And behind that’s the camera that you see me through.
BILL YATES: Okay.
CLINT PADGETT: So now I’m looking at you, and I’m actually seeing your face, and I’m looking right at you. But that doesn’t travel well. You know, it’s a big device.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: But when I’m in my office, it’s great.
BILL YATES: That’s good.
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah, yeah. We haven’t resolved that one.
BILL YATES: No, no.
Balancing Communication vs Overcommunication
WENDY GROUNDS: How do you strike the balance between just frequent communication, and then veering into overcommunication? Because that can be a problem.
CLINT PADGETT: Yeah, I think for me I try to think about project communication. And you want to have the update for the project on a regular cadence. And for us that’s usually weekly or every other week. While I would love weekly because then I know the data is only a week old…
BILL YATES: It’s fresh.
CLINT PADGETT: …it’s most people don’t work on one project at a time. They work on 10 projects. Even if I keep the meetings to an hour or less, I can’t afford to lose 10 hours of productivity; right? So, the way we get around that is let’s just update half in Week One, the other half in Week Two. And the cost of that is that your data is less fresh. Now it’s two weeks stale. But of course, through communication, we make sure that we don’t wait for the meeting to happen to have us solve a problem.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: You’re going to have those regular conversations. And I think the communication can happen through nonverbal; right? Now I could do a follow-up email that says, “Hey, we had our meeting today, and what I agreed to do was this, this, and this. I’ve confirmed by my boss these are okay to do.” Right? That doesn’t require a conversation. I think that we can do these one-ways, and then it’s going to be in Teams channels. Of course, the challenge you have, I think, with Teams is – at least for me, if you’ve got a solution, please let me know – it’s trying to find the conversation that I want when I’m dealing with 15 different people on five different projects and trying to figure out, okay, where did we – I know we discussed this. Where is it?
BILL YATES: And who, what thread, who was involved in that?
CLINT PADGETT: Yeah, exactly. So, I think, to answer your question, Wendy, I think that the overcommunication piece is where I am wasting your time. Then I would say, could this conversation be accomplished through just an email or a text? To me, those are better. The answer to that is yes, typically it’s a yes/no answer to a question. But if the question requires dialogue, then I’d want to have a conversation because I find that it’s quicker to pick up the phone and call you and chat for five minutes than it is to send back 30 different emails.
BILL YATES: Yeah, that’s a pet peeve of mine. It’s just finding that balance and, throughout the life of the project, having the conversation with the team, key stakeholders.
CLINT PADGETT: Yes.
BILL YATES: Is this too much? Is it not enough? Where are we? You know, there are times in a project, if I’m sponsoring one, where I’m feeling like things are fine. I really – I just need exceptions only. But there are other times when you’re about to hit a critical milestone or delivery. Man, I want frequent updates. So, flexibility; right?
CLINT PADGETT: Right.
BILL YATES: You need to have flexibility even in that cadence.
CLINT PADGETT: Yeah, I think the communication piece is key at certain points, like the beginning of the project, your critical milestone, if there’s a risk that has been identified. And there’s other times when you can drop to less. I find that people tend to want to drop to less communication than more communication; right?
BILL YATES: Yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: And that’s not good. You know, I deal a lot with engineers, typically. I can say this about engineers because I are one. And engineers, we tend to say, let me just focus on my thing. I don’t want to come to your stupid marketing meetings. And please don’t make me come to the stupid project management meetings; right? Let me just go off in my cubicle and design the perfect widget.
BILL YATES: Yes.
CLINT PADGETT: And so, they want to just kind of silo it. And I think we have to pull them out of the silo and force the conversations to happen because, left to their own devices, they would want to work in a vacuum. And we can’t have that.
Ideal Team Players
BILL YATES: I feel like we can’t have Clint in the room and not ask him the question about ideal team players. So, when you’re looking to put a team together, what qualities do you look for in those team members?
CLINT PADGETT: I think the first one is they have to be collaborative. There’s going to be a point in any project where you’re going to be asked to solve a problem that you did not create. You’ll just happen to be on a list of activities that are on this thing called the critical path. Somebody upstream from you caused an issue that has now rippled through, and the project will be late unless somebody does something to solve it. And somebody is at this point you; right? And it really is anybody that’s on the critical path.
So, the way I look at it is how are we going to solve this? And if you come into the mentality with, look, man, I didn’t break it, I’m not fixing it, we’re really going to struggle to be successful on a project. So, I think collaboration is the key. The number one thing is are they willing to collaborate? Are they, and I hate to throw around words like team player, but are they willing to step up to the plate and help fix a problem they didn’t cause? Are they willing to have – communicate? And are they willing to have conversations?
If you are, if you are one of those people that just absolutely, I cannot get out of your silo, then we’re going to have trouble because I know, I remember early in my career, I was 31. I’m not 31 anymore, just for the record. I was 31, and it was my first project at Caterpillar, the bulldozer company. And back then it was quite common to have people on the project team with 20, 30, even 40 years of experience. And I’ll never forget, it was my very first non-Coke project. This guy looks at me and says, “Son, how old are you?” And I said, “31.” He goes, “I’ve been doing my job longer than you’ve been alive. What could you possibly tell me?”
And the answer was the same as my answer today when I work on projects. Nothing. I’m not here to tell you how to do your job. You are the expert at what it is you do. But what we cannot have is you be the big black box that we have to just all sit around waiting for. So, what I need to know is what do you need from other people? How does it feed into you, and when do you need it? And then how long do you need to do your stuff, and then where does it feed after that? And so, I can’t have you be this silo. You have to be transparent. You can’t be the, I’m the magic box that all the stuff happens, and leave me alone.
And so that’s part of it is are you willing to come to the table, have those conversations, pull back the curtains and show us how the work is done, or at least plan out the pieces where you need stuff from others, how long do you need, and then where do you feed out? So, to me it’s about collaboration, and are you willing to work together? Those are really the two keys. Other than that, even if you don’t have the greatest skill set in the world, if you do those two things, we can make it work.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: We’ll get you the technical knowledge, for sure.
BILL YATES: “Ideal Team Player” is a book I’ve referenced many times on the podcast, Pat Lencioni, and he talks about humble, hungry, smart. If that team member that has all that knowledge is not humble, is not open to sharing that with the team, if they hold that like, okay, this is what makes me different and gives me control and power, man, I got problems.
CLINT PADGETT: Yeah.
BILL YATES: So yeah, you’ve got to be open. You have to be humble. You have to collaborate.
A Superintendent or a PM?
CLINT PADGETT: I remember early on in my career, my dad was – he was a superintendent on large industrial construction projects. So, he built, like, Owens Corning’s fiberglass plants and gold mines and all this. So, one day I said, “Dad, you know, you say you’re a superintendent. What does that mean? What do you actually do?” He said, “Well, son, every day I get my cup of coffee,” he says, “and I walk the job.” He says, “And I know the flow of the job.” Now, for those of us in project management, that’s called the critical path; right?
He said, “I know the flow of the job.” He said, “I know on any given day what has to be done today for us to open this facility 18 months in the future.” And he says, “So every day with my cup of coffee I walk the job, and I direct traffic. And I’ll say, Joe, stop doing this, the most important thing we get done this week is the scaffolding. Go help Joanne on the scaffolding. I direct traffic.”
I said, “But, Dad, that seems super inefficient. Wouldn’t it make more sense to bring everybody together at the beginning of the project, plan it out? So then, even if you’re not around, at any given point I can reach in my back pocket, pull out the schedule and know exactly what to work on this week?” He looked at me, and he smiled and said, “No, because I want to walk the job every day with my cup of coffee.” So, for my dad, not having a plan was job security.
BILL YATES: Yeah, yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: Which is kind of what you’re talking about; right? If I’m the only one who has the knowledge…
BILL YATES: Has the information, yes.
CLINT PADGETT: …you need me.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: But to me – and I love my dad. Don’t tell him I told you the story. But to me, a definition of a good project manager is, if I didn’t show up for a month, and things still flowed, that’s because you knew exactly what to work on, you had agreed it was yours, and you’re holding yourself accountable.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: That to me is a good project manager. If you need me, then we’re in trouble.
Clint’s Books
WENDY GROUNDS: You did mention that you’ve written two books. Why don’t you tell our audience a bit about them?
CLINT PADGETT: Sure. So, we teach a class called the Project Success Method, which is two days on everything I’ve kind of chatted about today. So back in 2009, I wrote a book called “The Project Success Method,” and that was published by Wiley. And it basically summarizes and goes through a lot of the topics I talk about in the two-day class. Of course, shameless plug here, the two-day class is always better because you get us live, and you get to ask questions you can’t get in the book. But then I look at project work as being, to me, two equal parts that are of equal importance. There’s process, and there’s people. And they’re equally important.
What I found over my career as I was teaching the classes, and maybe it’s just because the people I work with a lot of times are very technical, they were really good at the process side. Man, they struggle with the people side. So, I thought, how can I get that stereotypical engineer who doesn’t want to deal with anybody else and wants to be in a silo, yet had been promoted to be a project manager because that’s one of the things that happens is you take the person with really good technical skills, and you make them the project manager.
And how do I get them to understand people matter? And what are some strategies we can use to help them? So, then a couple of years ago, I guess it’s three years ago now, I wrote “How Teams Triumph.” And that was published by Forbes Books. That was my second book. And they’re both about the same material. One is heavier on the process side, and the other one is heavier on the people side. But they reference each other.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
Get in Touch
WENDY GROUNDS: If our audience wants to find out more or get in touch with you, where should they go?
CLINT PADGETT: Oh, yeah, for sure. You can go to ProjectSuccess.com. You can check us there. And you can find out more about me at ClintonMPadgett.com, or you can go on Amazon and find the books. I have a podcast, as well, called The Conversation. You can listen in on that. So, a lot of ways.
BILL YATES: Good name, The Conversation, yeah.
CLINT PADGETT: Of course.
WENDY GROUNDS: The Conversation, yeah. Is it all project management?
CLINT PADGETT: So, it’s, no, it is not all project management. It is – certainly that is an underlying theme. The goal of the podcast was to find authors that are writing about teams and conversations and interview them on their work. Academics, which is why I talked to Dr. Sherry Turkle, I also talked to Alison Wood Brooks from Harvard, who are doing research on teams and conversation and the importance of it. And then business leaders that have had big projects, how they’ve been successful.
BILL YATES: Excellent.
CLINT PADGETT: It’s all about giving tools to people that are working on projects, but it’s bigger than just project management.
WENDY GROUNDS: Right.
BILL YATES: Yeah, agreed. Clint, it’s so good to have you in the room with us, man. This has been a long time coming, and we’re so like-minded. I appreciate not only the research you’ve done and the books that you’ve written, but the spirit behind it. You’ve seen how to have success with projects, and you’ve seen the importance of teams, and how a healthy team leads to a successful project. And it’s reflected throughout everything that you do. And I appreciate that consistency.
CLINT PADGETT: No, it’s my pleasure. And I think one of the things that I always hear people say is, “This sounds like really good stuff to do for the Olympics. But, you know, my project’s not that big, and it’s not that complex.” I’m like, okay, so to me, everything we’ve talked about, and I really think project management only matters if deadlines matter. If deadlines don’t matter, then just put an Excel spreadsheet together and just check it off as you want to. But if deadlines matter, and the way I say it, if you’re going to lose your job or not get that promotion, or you’re going to lose a customer because you don’t hit the deadline, then deadlines matter; right?
So, for us, it’s the processes I talk to, you can scale up or scale down. Certainly, for big projects, we’ve done some huge construction projects in Times Square over the years. One Bryant Park, which is the Bank of America building; AOL Time Warner headquarters. These are huge projects; right? Very complex. Or we planned weddings. You know, the stuff scales. It’s just learning how it works.
WENDY GROUNDS: Thank you.
CLINT PADGETT: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
BILL YATES: Mm-hmm.
Closing
WENDY GROUNDS: That’s it for us here on Manage This. Thank you for joining us. You can visit us at Velociteach.com, where you can subscribe to this podcast and see a complete transcript of the show.
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