According to a 2006 survey of more than 1000 executives and project managers in 40 companies (http://tinyurl.com/ca4sv4), important projects are most likely to fail when five conversations don’t take place. In the spirit of Appreciative Inquiry, I’ve translated these into five key conditions for success:

1.    The project plan allocates sufficient financial & human resources and sets reasonable deadlines.
2.    The initiative has sponsors who provide leadership, clout, time, and energy to see it through to completion.
3.    Team members and leaders are accountable for agreed-upon priorities.
4.    Team leaders and members speak up candidly as problems arise.
5.    Team members support the project and team leaders are proactive and effective in communicating their concerns.

While everyone “knows” this, there’s clearly a disconnect between understanding and execution! The study concludes that initiatives fail 85% of the time when just one of these conditions isn’t met. Meeting the conditions doesn’t guarantee success, but the survey found a 50-70% reduction in the failure rate — aka improvement — when these crucial conversations take place.

Several years ago I worked with a group of very capable internal service providers who were deployed in various departments throughout their national organization. During my assessment, it became clear that the key to their shared dissatisfaction was allowing their clients to determine their roles, which inevitably limited the degree to which their expertise was put to good use. To show them how they could shift this dynamic (without being seen as contrary, a big concern for many service providers), I developed a simple yet powerful model I still use in my learning programs on Contracting for Results, sometimes known as, “You Want What? By When? Satisfying Customers Without Losing Your Shirt, Your Mind, or Your Job.” This model looks at the three vectors of success — expectations, capacity, and resources — and how they interact with the individual and joint accountabilities of the service provider and the client.

I’ve written before about the energy that’s freed up for productive and fulfilling work when our attention shifts from what’s wrong with others to how I/we can shape my/our contributions in more useful ways. Leaders — whether of organizations, functions, departments, teams, and projects — don’t always know how to make good use of the resources at their disposal, so service providers who know how to take charge of delivering their highest value can strongly influence the success of projects to which they contribute (not to mention their own satisfaction), even without technically being “in charge.”

For some folks, the transition from following orders to offering perspective is pretty easy once they recognize the choice they may never have known had before. Others want to be reassured that this is legitimate and professional option before taking what they perceive as a risk in approaching their clients differently. Most will benefit from some mentoring to help turn this new idea into an embodied reality. In my experience, nearly everyone gets good results with even a little effort turning the ship in a new direction.

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