Slack time in project schedules happen even if project management argues there should be no slack time when creating timelines. During this time the project manager sometimes look to fill the slack time of teams or members by asking them to help out other individuals or teams.

Is that a good practice?

Michael E. Porter is the most famous professor in business school whose teachings and works are must reads in the MBA program at Harvard as well as other business schools around the world. He is a Bishop William Laurence University Professor at the Harvard Business School who has written eighteen books and countless of resource materials. Regarded as the gold standard in management thinking, he has received various academic, business awards and civic medals almost only given to military and extraordinary sports achievers.

Biography

Michael E. Porter was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan to an army officer on 1947. He studied mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University finishing with a B.S.E degree with honors. He then transferred to Harvard where he got earned his MBA and PhD in economics.

What is project management?

Project management is the skill of managing and applying resources, tools and processes to produce results within a set of requirements, time and constraints.

What is a project?

A project is a unique and temporary endeavour to produce a product or service. Temporary means every project begin and end. Unique means the result of the project differs in some way from all other products or services.

There are lots of leaders and managers who do their best to assess weaknesses of a person and come up with training plans to help them with those weaknesses. While I am a big fan of helping people improve on areas they lack, I am a bigger fan of helping the person take his strengths to the next level. There is no such thing as the one and only authority on an area and having said that, leaders should realize that boundaries to push a person’s strengths are endless.

Experience in Point

Once a colleague belittled a team member explaining that was his way to motivate the individual, which turned out to be the reason the teammate asked for a transfer. How you motivate people differ from one individual to another and using a particular style should be thought of first before being implemented.

How do you identify the kind of motivational style that works best for the individual?

I stand by you, you stand by me. Leaders always have an unwritten contract with their members where both parties will be there watching each others back.

During the question and answer portion of the last general assembly in our company an inquiry written on paper was read, asking how management would feel if a leader or a senior manager within the group resigns.