“Being Present” is a common phrase today when discussing mental health. It’s so common that I feel like it’s wasteful of lines to describe it in much detail. Being present means focusing on the world around you right now rather than what has happened in the past, or what might happen in the future. What do you feel right now - physically or mentally? Who is talking to you? Focus on the task at hand. All of mindfulness meditations are practice to do just that. Focus on what is in front of your nose.

I’ve come to realize that “being present” is a useful concept in my work as well. Without focus, my job can be consumed with meetings, and preparing presentations for those above me in the food chain or for customers. Reports must be just so. Schedules need to be updated. Budget variance reports are due. 4-boxes must be completed. The other schedule needs updating.

This type of work is unavoidable, but if it consumes too much of your time, you may neglect keeping your project moving in the moment. You will find yourself spending increasing amounts of time reporting on your sinking status. I feel I need to spend a good portion of my week managing my program in the moment. What does that mean in this sense? It means walking around to your team mates to see what they are doing1. Where are they having success, what are they struggling on. What problems are not getting solved by others that you need to pick up the slack on? What is happening outside your team? How can you grow the informal connections between teams - increasing the probability of catching disconnects and increasing the probability of creative solutions. Establishing these connections takes work in the moment.

It seems that many believe that this type of work can be done in a handful of weekly status meetings where underlings are expected to bring in prepared slides of their status, schedule and “help needed”. I haven’t found that to be a successfull strategy. When I lead a meeting, I don’t want someone’s prepared information. I often don’t want their prepared data. I want to have done my homework during the week so I know what questions should be asked. The right questions may be ones intended to motivate, or ones intended to bring out critcal information that the whole team benefits from. Gathering my own data, and studying it in the process, helps me ferret out the problems for myself so that I don’t have to rely on people bringing them to me.

The job of a program manager or a project engineer should go beyond holding meetings demanding status from people and giving polished presentations upwards or to customers. A critical component is to be the oil in the gears. To make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. This can only be done by being mindful and watching your machine run and making adjustments as you go.

  1. This task has radically changed and been made more difficult in the virtual work world. ↩