Hala Saleh

Hala Saleh is a Director of Projects and Products for Rentler. She is also an Agile Coach and an active project management blogger on Twitter.

Learn how to be self-aware

Leaders understand that their attitudes and even emotional state has an impact on the team and people around them. People naturally want someone to lead them, and they want that person to be confident and generally positive. Providing that type of energy for a team is critical. I don’t mean to imply that a project manager should fake positivity or feign confidence when unsure about something. Rather, allow your confidence and sense of positivity to shine through when you experience them, and point out when things are going well. – Hala Saleh, Director of Projects and Agile Coach

I realized that becoming an expert in my field came down to how much I really wanted it

In 2011, after spending a little over a year at a job where being a good employee meant following the rules and not questioning authority, I attended a session at our local PMI Chapter. The speaker was someone who worked in the exact opposite environment to mine; he was full of life, vibrancy, passion, and most importantly, he had the confidence to challenge the status quo. At that moment I realized that I had more to offer than I was sharing at the time, and I realized that becoming an expert in my field came down to how much effort I put towards that goal, and how much I really wanted it. Since that day I have shifted my project focus to people, thereby becoming full of passion and enthusiasm for what I do. I have also ceased to accept the status quo wherever it doesn’t feel right to me. – Hala Saleh, Director of Projects and Agile Coach

Project managers fail to use their position to influence key decisions

Project managers are in a unique position where they have access to intimate details about the day-to-day status of the project, and they also have access to key stakeholders and decision-makers. This puts them in a position where they should be able to help the stakeholders make key decisions about the project by communicating early and often. In too many cases however, I’ve seen project managers fail to take advantage of their ability to influence decisions by mis-communicating the project’s status, or by not making the leap from purely transmitting information to making recommendations based on what they know. I witnessed this at a major financial services company where the project managers consistently changed any ‘red’ statuses of a very high-profile project to be ‘less controversial’ in order to avoid confrontation with executives. The project’s issues kept compounding to the point where executives had to be informed that the project could not be delivered on time. As a result the executives took control from that point forwards, and the project managers became sidelined and served only as coordinators. Not only did the company loose money as a result, the project managers’ reputations were severely tarnished and it took months to recover the trust of upper management. – Hala Saleh, Director of Projects and Agile Coach

Find a mentor or role model

Identify what it is that motivates you the most about your role, or about project management. Is it figuring out challenges and how to rally people around a solution for those challenges? Is it motivating teams to feel invested enough that they want to get things done to the best of their ability? Is it the satisfaction of completing projects within a set of constraints? Or is it figuring out how things can get done better? Identifying what it is that motivates you is an important step in understanding what your strengths and focus areas are, but also the areas you need to invest a bit more time in.

 You should also find a mentor or role model who is doing things the way you want to do them, and either emulate their behavior or work with them to identify areas where you can improve. Improvement should be constant, and we should all have self-improvement goals that we set and track. Having an outside opinion from someone who has been successful is a great way to gain perspective and get “outside of our own heads. – Hala Saleh, Director of Projects and Agile Coach

My top tips for stepping up and becoming a project leader

o   Identify what it is that motivates you the most about your role, or about project management. Is it figuring out challenges and how to rally people around a solution for those challenges? Is it motivating teams to feel invested enough that they want to get things done to the best of their ability? Is it the satisfaction of completing projects within a set of constraints? Or is it figuring out how things can get done better? Identifying what it is that motivates you is an important step in understanding what your strengths and focus areas are, but also the areas you need to invest a bit more time in.

o   Figure out what it is that you can do to streamline processes. Don’t just do things because that is the way they have been done historically. Innovate and propose ways to get from analysis to implementation faster.

o   Find a mentor or role model who is doing things the way you want to do them, and either emulate their behavior or work with them to identify areas where you can improve. Improvement should be constant, and we should all have self-improvement goals that we set and track. Having an outside opinion from someone who has been successful is a great way to gain perspective and get “outside of our own heads”. 

o   Create a continuous and authentic communication loop between yourself and your team. Don’t just ask for a status and then walk off; that is the best way to alienate people. Rather, be involved in their day-to-day and understand what’s going on in their work lives. And my favourite: conduct regular retrospectives. I could go on for pages on how important retrospectives are in creating engaged team members!

o   Learn how to be self-aware. Leaders understand that their attitudes and even emotional state has an impact on the team and people around them. People naturally want someone to lead them, and they want that person to be confident and generally positive. Providing that type of energy for a team is critical. I don’t mean to imply that a project manager should fake positivity or feign confidence when unsure about something. Rather, allow your confidence and sense of positivity to shine through when you experience them, and point out when things are going well. – Hala Saleh, Director of Projects and Agile Coach