The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How to Apply Ellen Kullman's 4 Crisis Principles to Projects | PPP #39

Episode Date: July 14, 2020

Sharing Ellen Kullman's 'Crisis Principles' as she explained them on the 'Masters of Scale' podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman and how Project Managers can apply them to their organization.

Please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and we will get started with People Process Progress in 3, 2, 1. Hey everybody, welcome back to the People Process Progress podcast. I'm your host Kevin Pinnell, back from Tybee Island, Georgia. If you have not been there, I highly recommend it. Worth the drive. Big open beach, fresh air air like i mentioned in the previous episode it's very good for the soul to reconnect with the ocean and just get some space get some sunlight made a big difference um so glad to be back with you all thanks again for all of you um we've broken 7 000 downloads that's pretty awesome and so i'm very appreciative of that. Please share this podcast.

If you think it's going to help somebody else, if it's helped you reach out to me, I'm always looking for help and feedback on how to make this better. And one way I wanted to do that this week with people process progress, episode 39, four crisis principles and the foundational four is I, by comparing essentially these four crisis principles from former DuPont CEO, director of General Motors, and currently the CEO of a 3D printing company called Carbon, Ellen Coleman, who was on one of my favorite podcasts, Masters of Scale, that's created by Reid Hoffman, who was a founder of LinkedIn, among other things. And it's just a really good, especially for folks just looking to do better in their business, whether you're the CEO or a startup or a podcaster, just really good ideas, really good mentorship,

leadership. And so as I was driving home, kids watching movies in the back, me, you know, put the sound toward the front of the car, listening to this podcast. And it was a really great and of course struck with me as you've listened to this show before you've heard of that concept of the foundational for that I put together through distilling various processes from project management, program management, from great knowledge has been shared with me of getting those objectives, organization, resources and communication. And so Ellen Coleman's four crisis principles came about both from her experience, 20 plus years with DuPont,

and then as an executive with the other areas I mentioned, and now with Carbon. And it was part of an episode focused, of course, on how we've all had to pivot and adjust and respond to crisis with COVID. And for me, from public safety, the military, incident management, used to kind of crisis response. And I got to do some of that as well in my current job as a project manager. But to me, these four principles, there's a lot of parallels and some crossover. And I think maybe consideration of an additional to make a foundational five, and I'll get into that in a second here. but a lot of similarities. And I think that speaks to how just good process can be distilled and is very similar across people's experiences.

So let's take a look at Ellen Coleman's crisis principles. We'll go there and then we'll compare them with those foundational four that I've spoken about. So the first of these principles that they talk about in that podcast episode is focus on what you can control. Makes total sense, right? If you're in the middle of a crisis, whether there's a big fire, there's a pandemic, there's financial straits that are out of your control, you've got to look at what can I do? How can I help? And to me, for the foundational four, that totally equates to get those smart

objectives, get people headed in the same direction or a direction. Because if we sit here, we're just going to spin our wheels. But I thought that was a great thing. You know, what can you control? What can't you control? And that episode I mentioned, in addition to Ellen Coleman, there's some other folks that talk about what they did with their businesses and how they pivoted. When a crisis shuts one area down, how do you make opportunity another? So focus on what you can control. 100% agree that I think that maps pretty parallel to the objectives that we establish in all hazards incident management or project management. What we want to control, what we want to direct our teams toward is all falls under those objectives, right? And if those objectives aren't realistic, to me, that's really from the SMART acronym, right?

The Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Based. That realistic piece, to me, is what directly maps back to Ellen Coleman's focus on what you can control because we can make this cool, lofty objective, but if it's not realistic, it's not going to happen. We can't control it. The next one she talks about and then to talk about in the episode is create your own trajectory, right? Don't always do what you've done before you've heard similar things like that and to me that's very similar to create the organization you need some folks whether it's from the project management body of knowledge agile incident command system training whatever they're told hey you have to do this or you use these this way and maybe sometimes it's not emphasized to say

here's the general principle but here's how you need to make your team to fit what you want to do, which means use the concepts, but be dynamic, right? So create the trajectory of the organization that you need to solve your problems, whatever that looks like. You could have the lollipop kid group. You could have the yellow brick road group, right? You know what I mean? You don't have to prescribe to a specific naming convention. You need to make it fit what you're going to use. And now there are principles you build that on. So while Coleman states create your own trajectory, absolutely map it out, figure out what you need to do, get your team headed in that direction. But there are some guardrails that you probably have to follow. But to that, look at what's going to fit for your organization, for your team, and head down that road. A little stutter step there. So the third

of these principles of Alan Coleman's four principles, crisis principles, is to be in constant communication. And so for me, that's exactly the same as the fourth. What I've put at last is communicate at all levels, which means horizontally and vertically as part of that foundational four. And so to me, that's, you know, we're talking to the C-suite and we're talking to the boots on the ground and we're doing that regularly. We're not leaving surprises, right? There shouldn't be that weekly check-in where someone isn't told something.

There shouldn't be an escalation point that the first time someone hears about it is when we all have to get together with our vendor partners and work through a really critical issue. We should have been talking the whole time. We should have status reports. We should have dashboards. It can be super basic in a crisis, anywhere from a pen and paper. These days, if we're virtual, we have to use those virtual tools. But old school, what, four months ago, a piece of paper, a whiteboard, whatever needs to happen. But now there's so many good digital tools. We can be in communication through chat, through phone calls, through email,

message boards, all these different tools. So it has to happen. And part of that is, so when you're to go back to the beginning of Coleman's list, when you're focusing on what you can control, everyone needs to understand what you're focusing on and what you're to go back to the beginning of Coleman's list, when you're focusing on what you can control, everyone needs to understand what you're focusing on and what you're trying to control and which direction you're trying to control that in. It's kind of my thoughts on those. And then when you have that trajectory, when you have those objectives, your organization,

you need to make sure that everyone understands what that is. Have you created that awareness? Like the ad car model speaks to, or everybody understands kind of the why of what you're doing and where you're headed, what are those objectives. And what I would include in the communication and trajectory kind of thing is also for me, that third of the foundational four is the resources, right? So at some point, when you're controlling things, when you're making a trajectory, when you're communicating, you're going to have to have people and stuff and facilities to make all this happen. Ellen Coleman's fourth crisis principle is to instill pride in your mission.

And to me, this latches on to this foundational four that I truly believe in, whether you're in the field, in an emergency operations center, responding to an information security incident, you're trying to find the missing person, starting a project, foundational four distilled down for me works. This great addition, this great concept of instill pride in your mission, to me equates to the leader's intent principle or concept, right? To you need leadership when you do an operational period brief, when you're going to send folks out hundreds or thousands of people out to look for a missing

person or to go fight the wildfire or to go support the civil unrest that's happening. You need leadership to provide the, we believe in you, we're here for you, this is all for the better good, instill the pride in that mission. And to me, that was such a great, or is such a great thing to remember for someone of Ellen Coleman's stature, right from the C-suite, is to give people, give the folks that work for her and with her pride in their mission, right? So not just here's what we're doing, here's all this, right? Again, along the parallel, along the lines of Simon Sinek's why, the awareness for ADCAR, it takes a lot more than just do this by this time, don't spend this much money. It's critical

to have leadership buy-in and caring. Buy-in is one thing to say, yep, I'll sign for that or I approve of that or let me know if you need something. But to have pride in your mission, to have pride that you're going to provide these technologies during a pandemic or you're going to pivot your company and make face shields like she talked about with her 3D printing company. Just really great stuff that I think inst you know, instilling pride in your mission could to me equate as in addition to become like a foundational five, even the first one is to establish leaders intent, right? And so that's kind of an addition, and we're really starting to rebuild the planning P. But to me, before you put those objectives together, even, I think it'd

be a great thing to make sure what's the leader's intent before we even go down the road of objectives, even though there's some crossover there. So again, it was just a great opportunity to listen to Masters of Scale with a great guest, great host. I saw many parallels. I hope you all benefited from the parallels and really Ellen Coleman's crisis principles of one, focus on what you can control, create your own trajectory three be in constant communication and four instill pride in your mission again this will be posted on the people process progress dot com website check out a little bit more there links to those podcasts mine and reid hoffman's thank you all so much again for listening i really appreciate it appreciate any feedback you can give me people process progress at gmail.com connect with with me on LinkedIn, Kevin Pinnell. Check out the Facebook page. Stay safe, wash those hands, and Godspeed.