Retrospective of Our Webinar on Jan 18, 2024

Dear Members and Friends of PMG-G,

In a small circle of interested professionals we started our journey in 2024 with Evan Tzivanakis, university adjunct professor, coach, author, and keynote speaker, who gave us a pleasure in talking about Leadership Skills for PM’s in the New World of Work. Something that we’re all in the play but we do sometimes not consciously get aware of those external factors that imply a change in our way of working.

Robert Baumgartner, President & VP Sponsoring, welcomed Evan Tzivanakis and all participants to our evening event at a time when outside got pretty much freezing. After introducing everyone to our ground rules of PMG-G Robert showed the agenda of our event before handing over to Evan.

Leadership Skills for PM’s in the New World of Work.

Evan Tzivanakis

University Adjunct Professor, Leadership Development Expert, Author of ‘’Leading in VUCA Times’’.
e: evan@executivecoachasia.com

Evan Tzivanakis took over and started explaining about the implications of VUCA world which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. All these key elements do make our job as a project manager more insecure with which we have to cope in finding a balance. In addition to these elements, we do also find an overlap with globalization, non-collocated teams, political instability, latest technology advancements, cyber security threads, war for talent, development of people, demographical change, and a lot of other side-effects.

As we live in an era of knowledge workers, we do also need to have a focus on our people as Evan Tzivanakis continued. So, people may change jobs more frequently than 20 or 30 years ago and may even have more than one job at a time. As a project manager we do consequently need to find out expectations from our team members to help them flourishing in their skills and performance, contributing to common goals that make our project and company successful by the end of the day.

To further introduce our audience on LinkedIn and YouTube to get to know some insights on human skills Evan Tzivanakis made a poll with us to also get an understanding what our participants think of the importance of leadership conversations at certain occasions. Our result is given in the picture above in which constructive feedback was considered to be the most important duty as a project manager after onboarding of team members and explaining processes.

As communication is for sure the most important part of leadership it should not only be considered as a tool, Evan Tzivanakis stated, but also as a fundamental mindset that creates openness, trust, and collaboration within a team. Independently from being an extrovert or an introvert manager communication is key to deal with and motivate people. He confessed that managers who prefer to work on their own without so much involvement with people will face difficulties in their role, leading other people apart from themselves.

Certain basics of sustainable communication which’s first of all a mindset and, secondly, a tool, Evan Tzivanakis brought it all up in a nutshell: openness, embracing two-way communication, revaluing diverse perspectives, encouraging innovation and being intentional in our messages. By doing so, a manager will shift from a command to an influential leadership style that cultivates a collaborative team culture that’s better known as high performance teams. And that’s what his understanding of good management is about.

Here, Evan Tzivanakis went on with different forms of communication: formal and informal set-up. The latter one might be the most important way of communication as it’s virtually done one-on-one or face-to-face in presence. No matter in which way it’s done those informal talks give trust to each other for exchanging ideas, thoughts, and plans. His key message of our event was: only by serving and treating ourselves in a way how we would like to see others acting in that way is to start with ourselves as a role model. As a leader we should thereby influence the behavior that we want to see from our peers in an influential way.

By answering a few questions from our audience Evan Tzivanakis closed his inspiring speech and dialogue of our event for which we’d like to thank him very much to enable us enjoying a great topic while exchanging views with our community. Finally, Robert Baumgartner shared some news from the board of PMG-G when it comes to our planning of events for the 1st quarter of 2024 before our event ended. We’d also thank Mirko Peters for his moderation and assistance during our event.

Podcast

If you missed our event, or if you just want to have a little refreshment of this topic that Evan Tzivanakis presented to us, then just click on the following weblink (https://www.linkedin.com/events/7148699435047297024/comments/) on LinkedIn.

Presentation

As a member of PMG-G you do have the privilege to download Evan’s presentation from the following weblink.

PDU Reporting

Our workshop took 1.25 hours of speech and dialogue which enables you to claim for 1.25 PDU as distributed over distinct categories below. The acceptance of your claim fully lies on responsibility of the PMI – Project Management Institute. You should follow the PDU allocation below when logging on to CCRS: https://authentication.pmi.org

If you’re not so sure how to claim your PDU’s on CCRS you can follow our guideline below:
https://pmg-g.de/beantragung-ihrer-pdus/

On behalf of the board of Project Management Group – Germany (PMG-G)

V.i.S.d.P. President & VP Sponsoring
Robert Baumgartner, SAFe 6 | PMI-ACP | Prince2
www.pmg-g.de