The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Life Lessons I learned from Gen. James Mattis (USMC, Ret.) book "Call Sign Chaos" | PPP #107

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

Sharing U.S. Marine Corps Officer standards as outlined by Gen. James Mattis (USMC, Ret.) in his book Call Sign Chaos and how we as Project Managers can apply them to our field.

Welcome everybody to People Process Progress episode 107, Applying 7 Marine Corps Leadership Standards to Project Management. I'm your host Kevin Pinnell and today I'm going to be talking about something that grabbed me as I was listening to Call Sign Chaos, a book by James Mattis and Bing West, as you'll recall. James Mattis is General James Mattis, USMC retired, who was also the Secretary of Defense for a little bit. And he wrote a book about learning to lead. His call sign was chaos. And I am only like 12 minutes and 15 seconds into chapter one and heard these seven things and thought, man, that is a great episode. But more so, those are great lessons to measure leadership by, particularly US Marine Corps leadership.

And I thought, us as project and program managers, why not hold ourselves to the same standards? So in this episode today, I'm going to go through these seven things, talk about how I've used these things or how I think about we could use these. I would love to hear your feedback as well. But first, it's time to lace up, chalk up, get logged in, and get locked on as we put people first, share our processes, and help each other make progress on the People, Process, Progress podcast with Kevin Pinnell. Hey, everybody. Thanks for coming back to the show. Happy spring. Welcome to episode 107, Applying Seven Marine Corps Leadership Standards to Project Management.

This is a really good audio book so far. It's always cool to learn about high-level leaders, folks that inspire and lead people both in combat and the civilian world at the highest levels. And really, the U.S. Marine Corps itself is an organization that's just super squared away. And, of course, General James Mattis, Secretary Mattis himself is as well. And, again, I heard these seven things and thought, like I've compared before, how can we as project managers or program managers or wherever you are, whatever capacity you're working in, apply these principles and think about it. Some seem like they don't

match at all, which you'll understand when I say them. But I think if we kind of change our mindset a little bit and think, how can I apply this principle, even though I'm not in the Marine Corps, I'm not in combat, right? I'm not training to be in combat or be in war. There's ways to do that. So let's jump into number one. And I have this image and article posted again on people process progress.com. So check that out, go read a little bit more there, get links to the book. But first is be physically fit, right? And so it's not a hundred percent job requirement. Of course, if you see a job posting for a project manager, program manager, other IT type stuff or other areas, they'll say like physical activity, lift 20 pounds. It's kind of the standard office worker type thing. But as I've talked about on

this show before, physical activity is a huge part of my life. Physical fitness, I think, is a huge part of keeping us all healthier. And for us as project managers, it's a great stress management tool, right? Preactive or, you know, preemptive, proactive exercise and fitness on a daily basis or very regularly will help reduce your overall stress. It certainly will help your fitness levels, your health levels, right? And I think that's a very important thing for us as project managers to do. We have enough stress on the job from holding ourselves to higher standards that we can go for that walk, hit the weights, do jujitsu, do something physical, whatever you like to do, but it's very important. And of course, you know, from General Mattis' perspective, you got to be in shape. You got to be as in shape or in better

shape as your people. A little bit different for project management, but it doesn't hurt to kind of lead by example. And the second of these to be tactically sound. So to know how to clear corners in a building or how to attack a town or, you know, basically kind of, you see that the war maps and those kinds of stuff, how can you tactically take advantage of, of things and attack and defend and that military stuff. I was a corpsman in the Navy, so I'm not a tactical guy, but you get the gist of it. Um, so project managers is to me, a few different interpretations. I think being tactically sound in our methodologies, perhaps, and at least knowing the stages,

the phases, or whatever methodology you use, what a sprint is, those kind of things. But also, in some industries, project managers and even program managers I've seen are described as actually being pretty technical, pretty tactical, pretty in the weeds. So knowing how to maneuver through the project, how to help your team maneuver through the project to the next milestone, to the next objective, if you will, is pretty direct correlation, right? And again, objectives foundation too. So being tactically sound is a very important thing for project managers and program managers, probably projects more importantly, to know that are we hitting our next steps or next milestones? And that reminds me of a question somebody had on Reddit of, do I need to know the minute detail of what the team is doing?

So a programmer, to which I would say yes and no. So yes, from the standpoint, you need to know it's done. You need to know that tactically that task is complete, but you don't need to be the one sitting there seeing how many backslashes they use in their code. That's not the thing. And I think that's that balance of being too tactical and kind of strategic. So tactical sound is the second of these Marine Corps leadership standards that I think we can apply as project managers as well. The third one, and this is one that sticks out that some folks will be thinking, how in the world can I apply that, is to call in artillery. Of course, Mattis means literally call in large shells of explosives or other ordnance to take enemies out or bunkers or whatever other structures.

Well, for project managers, calling in artillery sometimes is escalation, right? Whether it's we need escalation to get more resources, whether it's escalation, because unfortunately, we couldn't work something out with one of our teammates. So we need leadership to come in. That's to me what I think calling in the artillery is or calling in maybe an ace in the hole, someone that's really good at something, either, you know, better at you at a certain part of the planning process or a technical expert. But we need to call in our, you know, artillery in the form of resources and escalation and sponsors and business owners. And, and that's something that you should be comfortable doing really at any level,

whether you're an associate project manager or project manager or senior PM, and then certainly as a program manager, if your, your project managers and other folks need help, then we need to be able to call in that artillery in the form of people or stuff resources. Number four in these standards is adapts quickly to change. And so sometimes we can get too rigid as project managers are in our programs, right? And of course, kind of waterfall is traditional, we should do this, then this, then that. But even there, there's room to be more agile to be flexible to understand what happens at the beginning, what we think, our assumptions, and then what we even plan for a little bit and then get into are certainly all subject to change. And so as a project manager, you have to be ready to

adapt quickly to change based on the environmental factors, which could be what the company does, people leaving, the supply chain's not working, or maybe you get plucked out of your current project and you get sent to another one because they need you somewhere else, or the project gets shuts down. But you know, there's so many different reasons for change. But that's, again, why we do change management, you know, not only in the form of how people adopt new things or how we prepare them, but also change control. So are we doing change orders and change control and those kinds of things that we can adapt and we have a process in place, or are we comfortable in our leadership's comfortable, you know, knowing that, okay,

we've got to put a little more money into this part of the budget instead of that part of the budget. And it's not a big deal. Um, we just need to be able to re baseline things and kind of set stuff up. That's the nature of the game. I don't think I've ever been involved in a project that went exactly how we thought it was, you know, three months earlier. And I'd be interested to hear if somebody else did, but that adaptability to change, and certainly in Marine Corps,

you have to be able to, right? Because the battlefield or even a deployment after a disaster, it all changes in public safety for sure. But again, project managers have to be able to adapt to change. Number five is that the platoon responds to you or does the platoon respond to you. So as a Marine Corps officer

leader, you have a platoon of people, it's a group of people that report to you, right, in various levels, commission officers, non-commission officers. And so to me, this equates to do your project team members respond to you, But then also, you know, so it's less so more to your leaders respond to you than say your subordinates. And even if you're not an official, you know, reporting line as a project manager, people look to you as the lead of the project, right? Rightfully so. So does your project team respond to you in a positive manner? Meaning can you ask them to do something or check on something, let's say, probably more so, you know, when there's a task that they know they own and you check on it. Did they get offended?

Did they feel micromanaged? Do you have a good relationship? Do they respond and say, oh, no, no, I can take care of that, like they're willing, they want to do the work? Not just for you, but we are a big factor in the enthusiasm our team has or the willingness to do work when we give them tasks because they don't typically report to us, whether it's temporarily or for a long-term project, that dotted line. And so we need to think about how we're building our relationships, how are we trusting our team,

are we over their shoulder all the time? Like I mentioned that example earlier of having to know the backslash in the code versus just tell me if it's done, if there's any blockers I can help you with, if you need more help yourself, or this is just too much, or tell me if the plan is wrong. Because, again, we as project managers are going to build the plan and facilitate the process, but we need subject matter experts to tell us how to actually do these things that we don't know how to do. But what you can know how to do is go to peopleprocessprogress.com, subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you like. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. There's my little kind of three quarters of the way through plug. Number six, lead by example.

This one applies to parenting and maybe fitness. You know, if you're helping your kids learn how to exercise and things like I'm doing more with my oldest son and leading by example, of course, in the military is optimal. I, as a young Navy petty officer, wasn't good at this. The power kind of went to my head a couple of times, wrote a few papers on leadership. I think I mentioned that on episodes a long time ago. And then learn the hard way, right? Learned from, by example, for a lot of good leaders I've had, both in the military and

in the public sector and private sector. And for us as project managers, a big part of how I try and do that is, especially with my emotions, at least on calls and at work, is again, this is work, unless I'm actually working on a deployment or response, which I don't really do these days. This is software that's going somewhere that, yes, it helps patient care.

Yes, it helps someone be more efficient in a process, But it's not a life or death situation right there. Right. And so if we can lead by example and control our emotions be imperturbable, which is a thing I use in episode 10, a long time ago, the between the slides podcast that General Grant was known for, just staying calm, right when things aren't going well, when maybe we're having to adapt to change like that number four, I mentioned, because then't going well, when maybe we're having to adapt to change like that number four I mentioned. Because then in number five, your platoon or your team will respond to you as well. So if you can keep your cool on the call, you know, and adjust, but also hold folks accountable, it's a good balance. And then, you know, the other thing to lead by example is maybe there's times you do have to jump in and roll your sleeves up and get equipment ready, right?

And so that's a good thing to do. Or, you know, you get lunch catered. Don't be the first one in line to get lunch. Leaders eat last, right? That's a great principle. That's from the Marine Corps. It's also the Simon Sinek book. So think about those kind of things, leading by example.

There's so many other different ways to look at, right? Maybe for you as a project manager, leading by example for other project managers in your PMO. Or if you're standing up a PMO just by showing examples of your work, always looking to help make the PMO better and other people better, you get the gist of it. So that one is a pretty direct emulation from Marine Corps standards. Number seven, and certainly this is fitting of James Mattis, General James Mattis retired, whose call sign was K-Off, is are you or do you try to be as tough as your troops, right? And of course, the Marine Corps is super tough, military service, combat's tough, the training is tough. And as project managers, you know,

it's less applicable from kind of what we do. But, you know, the folks on our project teams are putting in the work, they're sitting there coding or they're, you know, out there building the building. They're working probably long hours, right? Longer than us a lot of times. So are we putting in the extra hours with them? Are we again, rolling our sleeves, turning the screwdrivers if you needed to put equipment right together? Are you getting them food? Are you coordinating stuff that keeps them going? And you're not complaining about it, right? So they don't see you complaining about how long the shift is and how tired you be, you know, as this standard for Marine Corps says, as tough as your troops, but to be able to put in the work and hang with your team, I'll say, I guess, for the project management. So thank you for hanging with this podcast. Pretty short

episode, but no need to belabor the point. So a lot of these are pretty direct. So again, the Marine Corps standards be fit, physically fits the first one, which I think is good for all humans. Tactically sound, right as a Marine, as fit, physically fit is the first one, which I think is good for all humans. Tactically sound, right, as a Marine, as a Marine officer and as a project manager, whether you're a technical project manager or knowing the project management space, that's huge. Call in that artillery. So escalate, ask for additional help if you need to. Escalate if things aren't working well. Escalate for yourself if you're overwhelmed.

The fourth one was adapt quickly to change. That's pretty straightforward, right? We can't expect what happened three months ago to be exactly the same now. That doesn't mean we don't hold people to the standards, but just stuff changes. Number five, platoon responds to you. Does your project team respond to you? Are they willing to work with you? Are they excited to do it? They say, hey, I'll take that. That's a sign of a good relationship and trust. Lead by example, right? Put the work in, be to the meetings on time or early, you know, and nobody's perfect, but by and large, we should be doing that. And then seventh, are you as tough as your troops? Are you putting in the work like they are? Maybe

not in the exact same way, but they don't hear you complain about it. You're helping the project succeed and toughing it out with them on those long, funky go live shifts that a lot of times we face. That's the nature of the beast. So thank you so much again for coming to the show, for listening, sharing, subscribing, all that good stuff. I hope you all stay safe out there. Please wash your hands and I wish you all Godspeed.