Project Lead Summit 2023
Galloway values people. We recognize achievement, collaborate, respect everyone, and acknowledge each person’s strength and inherent value. We held our first Project Lead Summit to align with this core value.
The Project Lead Summit directly resulted from the first Project Manager Summit held last year. A key takeaway was a gap between our project leads and project managers regarding technical skills and job responsibilities. Our leadership determined the most effective way to approach closing the gap was to hear from the project leads about how they best develop and learn.
Eric West, manager of employee growth and development and facilitator of both summits, states the importance of listening to team members.
“Instead of senior leadership or project managers telling the project leads, ‘this is what you need to do,’ we need to find out what is important to the project leads. Then they are more likely to want to succeed and get involved.”
However, how to close the gap is defined by many people in different ways. “If you ask 70 people what closing the gap means, you will get 70 different answers,” said Eric.
To tackle this challenge, the summit was broken down into five sessions. It was guided similarly to the project manager summit – framed around the 13 behaviors of a high-trust leader and a fixed versus growth mindset.
“These summits are a learning laboratory,” said Eric. “We create stuff, we invent stuff, we blow stuff up. All of that is valuable. Instead of training team members only one way to improve, we discuss multiple ways and learn which resonate most with them.”
The first session was about creating a foundation of trust, establishing a growth mindset, and defining the project leads’ “heavy rocks” or biggest challenges, personal, team, company, or client.
The subsequent three sessions, scheduled to occur within the next couple of months, will be focused on distilling those challenges into three or four overarching themes that address how to help close the gap and the corresponding action benefit.
“That benefit piece is very valuable. Often, we walk out of meetings with a list of actionable items, but if you are not in sync with the benefit, it does not make sense,” said Eric. “Action benefit at its highest level is when the direct benefit is never for yourself. It is for your team, organization, the client, and the community. You will indirectly be recognized for your actions when you benefit from that.”
For the last session, the project leads will discuss with senior leadership what they learned and the action benefits they plan to initiate.
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