Forced to Lead

Forced Into a Leadership Role

By

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Managerial Leadership

Instructor:

In an effort to close an IT gap, Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District (MSD), has been thoroughly assessing its IT capabilities, and adopting more modern technologies and business practices. However, the state of IT at MSD has been – and is still currently – far behind that of other government agencies and the private sector. The result has been an aggressive – and much needed – leap into modern IT. While MSD is still in the midst of this technology leap, upgrading MSD's business intelligence capabilities appears to be the best path toward meeting its goals of efficiency and service. Accordingly, the upgrade to their Asset Management application has been decided upon as the next step in MSD's IT transformation. During the first project management meeting, I was designated the Team Lead for the application upgrade implementation. The implementation, as I was told, was to take three months maximum. As forced upon the responsibility as the team lead, I was faced with a situation that requires expertise with our IBM Maximo application, job reassurance for our departments' consultants, along with implement actions and personal behavior to inspire followers with motivation. The main issue is with the amount of the workload along with the unfeasible deadline. A proof of concept takes 60 days and with no experienced technicians in the organization to perform the upgrade, we will all be treading in uncharted waters. The following section will provide an overview on three distinct leadership topics used to overcome the four areas of failure in our department during my successful application upgrade project.

• Section I.) - Implementation (motivation)

• Section II.) - Communication Skills (Listening)

• Section III.) – Team Building Skills

Four areas of Failure:

1. Failed cross-representation agreement on enterprise wide business processes. For common information system to work across the organization, all users across the organization must adopt, adhere and support common work methods supported by the application. Any department or line of business which chooses not to conform, emphasize politics over process or engages in sub-optimization will become the weak link that will ultimately break the chain and render the enterprise-wide system ineffective.

2. Lack of visible, vocal and meaningful executive sponsorship. While MSD's upgrade projects lacks executive sponsors. MSD's executive sponsors cannot stand on the side lines merely watching the game. They must visibly, vocally and actively demonstrate leadership, commitment to the project and support of project team members at every possible point. They must quickly intervene to resolve obstacles and champion the projects forward movement.

3. Lack of formal and disciplined project management. The implementation of a mission critical business system is not the time to figure out project management for the first time. Experienced project managers leverage their skills, their experience and a proven project management discipline in order to advance projects according to plan and toward predicted success.

4. Project team turn-over of key staff. Losing an executive sponsor or project manager will delay MSD's project's progress. Losing these roles multiple times or substituting lost roles with less capable replacements can dramatically increase risk and wreak havoc on the project.

Section I.

Implementation:

The implementation aspect will focus on participating in a democratic leadership style where followers are included in decision-making processes by encouraging feedback, asking followers' questions and taking the followers' suggestions with serious consideration.

Expectations

• Establishing open communication for personal needs and expectations played hand-in-hand to drive motivation within my team. Not ignoring personal needs within the team allowed individuals to expect their efforts to result in specific outcomes such as pay, recognition, survival or avoidance of punishment. In addition, as their team lead I was forced to develop responses to goal-oriented behaviors that are valued by co-workers and apply those responses in a fair and consistent manner.