The power of Commitment

By Alfonso Bucero

If you make a commitment and you are persistent, you will move mountains. Leaders who inspire commitment to their people contribute directly to project success. Projects are done by human beings who make right and wrong things during the project life cycle. That is part of human behaviour that many executives forget that exists along project execution in organizations.

How to learn from right and failures characterizes a project learning organization. Trying hard and making a lot of attempts is known as commitment and persistence in general sense. Taking into account that projects are uncertain endeavours, project teams and project managers will achieve right or wrong results. Depending on the point of view of those teams and leaders, those results will be considered as “failures or as opportunities to learn”.

The learning attitude is a good characteristic of the right project leader. Every day I can learn something in my project, and it does not matter if I can learn from my people, from my customer or from other project stakeholders. The most important thing is how to move from failures to project success.

In my opinion commitment is the essence. The key to getting what you want is the willingness to do whatever it takes” to accomplish your objective. What do I mean by this willingness? It’s a mental attitude that says: if it takes five steps to reach my goal, I’ll take those 5 steps, but if it takes 30 steps to reach my goal, I’ll be persistent and take those 30 steps. In most of ocasions in the project field you don’t know how many steps you must do to reach your goal, or to accomplish your deliverables. This does not matter. To succeed, all that’s necessary is that you make a commitment to do whatever it takes; regardless of the number of steps or activities involved.

Persistent action follows commitment that is you first must be committed to something before you’ll persist to achieve it. Once you have made a commitment to achieve your goal, then you’ll follow through with relentless determination and action until you attain the desired result. The most difficult thing I found is how to convince your team about the big business impact that commitment has in projects in organizatons. When you make a commitment and you are willing to do whatever it takes, you begin to attract the people and circumstances necessary to accomplish your goal.

For instance, some years ago I was responsible for implementing a PMO (Project Management Office) at an IT multinational company. The manager of that organization didn’t believe in project management, I only had in my team a group of junior people, without experience in project management. However I achieved some tangible results in few months. The key for project succes was that my vision “turned from potential failure to possible success” in my mind, and it was an incredible engine. I spent a lot of time meeting project stakeholders and searching project’s allies in my organization, meeting my team members, explaining the purpose and objectives of the Project Office and training them in project management basics.

The key for the project succes in this story was spending time to explain to my team members that everyone must be accountable and responsible for their tasks and activities; that mean getting team members commitment. Speaking the truth to all project stakeholders about the project was also a key. I created the need to learn along the project life cycle, identifying right and wrong insights. I believe that once you commit yourself to something, you create a mental picture of what it would be like to achieve it. Then, your mind immediately goes to work, attracting events, circumstances and people that will help bring your picture into reality.

It is important to realize, however, that this is not a quick process, and you need to be persistent and, most important, educate and support your people about persistence, that I believe is a must for project success. Usually project failures preceed project succes if all project stakeholders and ready to learn and take an action in both cases.