Retention: A Deep Dive

caliber. Ultimately, in order to keep people on the job retention is a huge issue these days, economists are telling us that it's going to continue for quite some time, etc, as a challenge. So we want to look at that, but in the context, of course of projects, as opposed to the normal corporate role. Joining me in studio today is my brother and business partner Dale, coming with a significant project experience, and on both sides, both part of the project

and leading projects. So we'll have a look at the tension from both sides of the desk, if you wish. But before we jump into that, let's take a moment to talk about safety. We happen to be recording this in the month of November. And for most parts of the world, that's a bit of a change of seasons. It's a time when, if you're in the northern hemisphere, we're moving from summer and fall into potential winter. That means slippery conditions, things that we haven't experienced for the last

six months or so. And of course, if we're in the southern hemisphere, it's the other way around. So one way or the other, that change of seasons, brings with it a need to re acclimatized ourselves to something different. So from a safety perspective, whether that's on a project, whether that's at home, whether that's in the office, or just out enjoying yourself, in some leisure activity, being conscious of the fact that temperatures are changing, conditions are changing, and we

need to pay attention. So that we last week, in the podcast of the previous episode, we talked quite a bit about the bigger picture of employee retention, if you wish project, team member retention, it was in terms of purpose and, and kind of why

we're doing it. But today, I want to do a bit of a deep dive into understanding what is it that project leads and do to actually ensure that people stay, economists are telling us that for the next literally 15 years, we're going to be in a labor shortage situation, the supply and the demand are getting wider and wider, the gap is getting wider, and it's not going to start to change for the next 10 or 15 years. So we're in

this for the long haul. This isn't like, you know, when we began COVID, we didn't know how long we were going to be in this. So you know, we we took our time making decisions, etc. Because we thought every month was going to be the last month. Well, we now know that we've got good 10 to 15 years ahead of us where the labor market is going to be a challenge. Getting good people and keeping good people is going to become more and more of a corporate priority. And in fact, a differentiator in terms

of business success. So let's talk about specifically, you know, if you're sitting in a chair of a project lead today, keeping your people on board has got to be one of your number one priorities. Would you agree? I know, I would totally agree. I mean, I think that is one of your main roles as a project leader or budget manager is the resources that are on your project and keeping them as functional and high quality as you can throughout the duration

of the project. Otherwise, you don't have any chance of success. I think sometimes we pay lip service to our strength is our people. Yeah, for sure. And but what we're seeing is, in fact, our strength is our people. And if we don't get that, right, yeah, we can get the engineering, right, we can get the software, right, we can get a whole bunch of other things, right. But if we don't get the people, right, we're,

it's a challenge. And I'll tell you in the many years where I did project audits, basically, looking at the what we used to call post mortems. You might want to call them after action reviews, whatever that might be. One of the questions I would always ask was, would the team work together again in another project? Now, you might have met the budget, you might have met the scope, you might have met the type of timeline. But if a team absolutely refuses to work together again, what's the

project really successful? Yeah, so let's see. Talk about those some of those individual things what, you know, if you were looking again at what are you doing to help people stay on board? I mean, I think,

see that relationship. I mean, they understand that they control the schedule, that they have a lot of control around around tasks and those types of things. But I don't think they see themselves quite in that boss. role from a relationship perspective. The people in the project, however, I think, are see that more clearly. Because they know that this is the person who reports back to senior leadership, this is the person who controls the tasks on

the schedules. This is the person who so that person has a lot of a boss like influences on that person's job and career. So it's perhaps clear from the perspective of the person on the project, but I don't think it's as clear from the leader, the

project manager. So that poses, you know, even more of a challenge, because you know, that to put yourself into that headspace of saying, okay, my relationship with the people on this project is, you know, has components to it that I might not have thought about.

part of their life. But ultimately, the relationship we have with them is about their contribution to this project. And so even though we may not have perfectly, we may not see, you know, our direct role that we have in keeping with the company, for instance of the business and whatever their experience on the project is real to them. And their relationship with us as project managers is real to them as

well. It's really interesting, because, you know, a recent study showed that if all things were equal, if you could quit your job, and not have to worry about money and not have to worry about other things 80% of North Americans would start going to work. So that's pretty significant. I mean, it suggests that only 20% of people going to work because they love it, etc. They just want to be there. I mean, there's always that question, if you won the lottery tomorrow, would you continue

going to work? And some people? I mean, of course, it's hypothetical, because we have won the lottery, but some people? Absolutely. So the people who are absolutely, I continued going to work, I bet if we go down, we would discover that if you keep going to work, not just because the work was a challenge and exciting, but because of the relationships

that they didn't want to lose. I think coupled with that we as project leads, we struggle with the fact that we don't have 100% of control over this person's time. So it's almost like managing volunteers to get some, you know, in some cases, and of course, a volunteer by nature of the engagement can leave if they want to leave. So I think it's incumbent on project leads to, to be even more aware of the relationship that they're creating. Now, I add to that, we've talked about that. 80%.

But I add to that, the fact that, you know, we keep talking about motivating people and engagement and those kinds of things. But recently, I've started to look in to understanding how do we inspire each other? You know, we often will give feedback when we talk to people in Project context, in the work context and building

that relationship. And there are times when I know for instance, in my marriage, there have been times where I will get into a bit of a confrontation with my spouse, and she will stop me and say, Would you talk to a customer that way? And I find myself thinking, No, I wouldn't. Why is it that we don't treat our staff like they were customer. So part of that relationship as well is, am I taking you for granted? How am I treating you with respect them so on? So let's bring it back then to the

for doing this deep dive. What's that conversation sound like look like in terms of the way we talk to people on our teams, the way we treat them and so on? Because those words are powerful in terms of the relationship that we have. Yeah. So kind of question for you imagine a scenario where we're running a little late. And you need to have a conversation with me about the fact that my component

isn't arriving on time. And in that sense, I'm holding up a number of other people, part of the project or whatever, you know, what's, what is your relationship come in to that dialogue.

of the job. So yeah, your your, most of your interactions with that team, are going to be around some stress point, a deliverable of some kind of timeline, a budget of whatever something went wrong. So you know, obviously, you've got some that are successes, like we talked about last time, and you do want to celebrate those of you who want to take as much advantage of those as you can to build relationships, nothing

else. But you are going to have an awful lot of conversations that are going to be around some kind of stress. So how you manage those conversations, how you deal with those conversations, I think are is a huge part of the success or not.

And a lot of that, to your point comes down to attitude and the language that we express with our attitudes, you know, so I think one of the first things that comes to mind for me is not to take the schedule or the deliverable of the whatever person, right, it kind of becomes, it can kind of become easy to sort of look at it and think you're screwing up my timeline. You're mucking, not my deliverables are getting in the way of my success of the project. While there may be a

part of that, that's true. I think as a project leader or project manager, you need to move away from you need to not show that specifically to the team members. You know, it's our project, it's our deliverable. But if it ever becomes a, this is mine, and you're breaking it, I think you right off the bat that relationships gonna go down?

to respond. So if we bring it back to the whole retention side, then part of helping people stay, whether that's on the project or with the business, or whatever, is what that dialogue looks like, when performance isn't where we

needed to be. I think if we add to that, the fact that we often only approach people, especially in the project world, when we're in trouble or when things are delayed or whatever, we don't have enough of the proactive conversations, because we're busy and all sorts of things are happening that allow us to change that balance. Some studies have shown that for every negative comment, you need 10 positive comments in order to counteract it, because our psyches, even the language we

use is often very immune. It's an industrial age. language that really comes in many cases from military applications. So you know, we, you know, we talk about, you know, we blew that one out of the water or we you know, we're gonna we're gonna blow this up, but you know, we use those things. Even somebody the other day said to me, you know, even in PowerPoint, we have bullets. Right? We crashed at you. That's right, right, exactly. So we use all of these

kind of more. Yep. granulated aggressive, and our subconscious responds to those as aggressive terms, whether we like it or not. So again, we turn it back to even paying attention to language to how we're starting that conversation. And I think if the only time I ever get to talk to you is when I'm in trouble, or when maybe not in

trouble. No, things are not going well, then, you know, I'm immediately going to be on the defensive, right, if every time you know, in high school, you got called into the principal's office was because you were in trouble, you don't see the principal, as an ally in your education, you see the principal as the guy you don't want to have to ever meet. So I think the same goes in projects, it's even more of a challenge, of course, and say, the regular relationship of a non project manager.

real mix of relationships. And obviously, you know, if you have some people that you have a good professional relationship with, because you've known them for a long time, you've developed some, some ground rules around that relationship, you're you, you know, you know how to talk

to each other? You can you've had situations before, that you can, you know, base your relationship off of where the two of you don't think that every little comment is adversarial, then you can you can work with that relationship differently than you can with someone who you don't have any of that background. And so how do you kind of quickly tried to develop those reports? What are the things you can do to quickly get more engagement with the people who you don't know as

well. And then, you know, whether anything, and so I think some of that is, is having conversations long before we're at the point of something critical, having conversations just about life, about what people like to do about why they're passionate about whatever their domain is on the project, right? Understanding some of those things, understanding, you know, what drives those people, what makes them makes them engaged in the

work they're doing. But their passions are, you know, having those conversations can be really, really helpful. Because I think it helps us to, when we get into some of those tougher situations, to interpret things that are said differently, we don't automatically assume that the person is being defensive. I think it's also good if you do have some people on the project to know you well, to enroll them in that effort. If you can say to people, hey, you know, you and I get along really, really

well. There's these three people on the project that I don't know all that well, yet. I'm working on it. If you see anything, where I'm not relating to them, Well, I'm doing whatever mentioned. Right? Like, don't let me don't let me go too far. And certain things don't let me make those mistakes. If you notice them, give, give your allies a chance and an opening to help you manage through some of those things.

know all that, well. It's very easy to think we understand what's going through. And I think we do have a bit of a predisposition to to put maybe words in other people's mouths, they're not here use of I think they're going to be I there's a question that many years ago, somebody asked me and I've taken that to heart and that is what is it that you know about me, that I don't appear to know about? And we all have that

blind spot, right? Where, you know, you might find that you know, somebody tends to bark a little bit when they talk that they don't hear themselves talk that way. In a new comer is John Maxwell calls this lovely story. About a executive secretary, who had two mugs on her desk, one was a green mug and one was a red mug. And when she was drinking out of the red mug, it told everybody that today's not a good day to approach executive, the green mug, good

day, right? indicators to kind of say, Hey, this is the mood. Now I'm sure that executive never knew she had knows, and probably would have been mortified to discover that. But they figured out how to have good days, that sort of thing. So again, it's a question of, you know, what do you know about me? Well, I know that, you know, when you when you upset, you tend to look for scapegoats. So you tend, okay, so how do I calm

me down? I certainly know. You know, I remember early days project where one of the guy said to me one day, you must be hungry, let's get you a donut. And I realized, it's because my reaction, maybe I was. My reaction was one way, he said, This is not the normal view. So again, when we come back to retention, the more vulnerable we can be, the more open the more we can allow that we to struggle with things, the more people are likely to open up to

us as well. Because one of the things when we you know, we want to ultimately solve that bottleneck, whatever it is, and we want to keep the project. But we don't want to do it in a way that gets people on the defensive, whether they're just doing it or if they have to do

it. And the minute there's an opportunity not to they're going to leave or whatever, you want to do it in a way that says, We all struggling with stuff, I'd rather you come to me, before it gets comes to a head before we're really at a problem level. I've built enough trust that you can come to me as challenges are occurring. So we can be solving

them together. Or in some cases, you know, and it's not a question of reporting in it's more a question of benefiting from the resources of the key Yes, where that's where that's possible. But you have to create the environment that allows that to happen.

absolutely right with that. And, you know, a lot of it comes down to being willing to try and know, the people you're working, right, know how they do. I mean, I'm sure you've had, I've had colleagues, I'm sure you've had colleagues where you just know that the very first time you bring something to that person, what you're gonna get is all the reasons why that can't work. Right, that's, that's the first thing that happens. And I've had colleagues where that's true.

And you let them do that. And then tomorrow, they come to see you with the solution to the problem. Okay. But they needed to get through that first. Plus, that's how their thought process works. They're not trying to be negative, they're there, the way they get to a positive solution is by first, Claire clearing, clarifying what all the problems

are. And once they've got the list of problems, and they've got it all open, and they know it's all there, then they're able to kind of work those things through and come up with the solution. If you react to the first without leaving time for the second, then, you know, that doesn't work. And so part of that is getting to know those people and getting to understand a little bit about how they react, why they react the way they do. How do you not take the first reaction of everything person?

ultimately to that. Part of the key to the whole retention issue is when people feel invisible when people feel not respected or even disrespect. When people people feel that their input is valued, for there is no value in that value relationship. When they feel that way. They don't stick around. And I mean a better offer comes or greater opportunity comes they're gone. On the other hand, there's a huge attachment we have when we feel wanted when we feel needed when we feel respected when we

feel valued. And that doesn't happen. If it's all about the bar. Yes. So, you know, to wrap up, I think a key message for podcast listeners today is really practicing to put yourself second, put yourself in that kind of subordinate role, so that the other person gets a chance to shine gets a chance to express themselves. Without you jumping in now, I will tell you honestly, that's not an easy thing to do not at all. It means constantly checking ourselves.

And one of the ways that I found over the years to do that is to be open enough to say, when you see me so that question asked earlier around, what is it you know about me that I don't see, when you see me exhibiting that blind spot? Let's agree on a code of Hue some little way without embarrassing me in front of a team or a group or whatever, that you remind me that I'm falling into that behavior again. And when we can do that, that creates that respect that says, hey, I want

to get better. But it's not easy. It's a little bit like saying, I'm all the time don't even do it anymore. Until somebody says, That was 22. I'm really. So it's the same thing for our how are we relating to our individual contributors in that sense? And how we're putting them first? I will tell you that that flies in the face of a lot of hierarchical organizations, yeah, for sure. But it gets results.

everything else. But I think that if, you know, ultimately, the people on those projects are the ones that make or break the projects and investing in that is really what's going to give you the success in the long term.