It has been said, “Teaching is the best form of learning.” When was the last time you put on your teaching hat to help someone else? When you take time to help others, you not only do them a favor but you also improve your own skills in the process of helping them with theirs.
Part of being a good project manager is using your project management skills and talents to give back to the community. Ask yourself this question: “How can I help someone else reach his goals and dreams?”
Helping others is an often-overlooked avenue to achieving success, and yet it’s perhaps one of the best ways to become successful. Each and every one of us has the ability to help someone else in a significant way. We all have unique, innate talents and strengths that can serve others. What we do with these talents defines who we are, professionally and personally.
One of the best ways to help others is by starting or joining a Mastermind group. Don’t know what that is? Neither did I when a friend asked me to lead a gathering of her small-business friends in Simsbury, Connecticut. What I learned is that a Mastermind group is a collection of people who agree to get together periodically with the sole purpose of expanding their opportunities. My friend got the idea after reading Napoleon Hill’s book, Think and Grow Rich (Ballantine Books, 1987). She assembled 22 people for our first get-together. We agreed to meet every two to three weeks throughout the year.
The experience I had leading my friend’s group was nothing short of amazing. People brought business problems they couldn’t seem to solve, and after a few months they came out with stronger businesses and more confidence in themselves.
The key behind the Mastermind philosophy is that you are putting people of various strengths into one room. You may have a problem that seems insurmountable, but for someone else it may be a routine snag they have already overcome.
When joining a Mastermind group, take a minute to evaluate your strengths and to realize the assets that you can bring to the table. The more people you help, the more you will learn, and the stronger you’ll become as a project manager.
Recently Cheetah Learning donated a one-day course, Project Management Project Accelerator, to a nonprofit organization to help it prosper. We picked a foster care and adoption agency because we saw the great work it was doing for children and adolescents in its town, and we knew how important it was for the nonprofit to do well for the sake of its community. During this one-day course, we taught what we knew best: How to run fast and effective projects. We didn’t really expect to learn much that day because, hey, we were the teachers! But we forgot the golden rule, “Teaching is the best form of learning.”
During the process of teaching this organization how to manage projects, we had to answer hard questions about how to apply standardized project management practices and techniques to the very volatile world of foster care. We learned more about what it was like to manage projects in the nonprofit human-service sector, which is very different from our typical corporate clients.
The point is, the more you can get out and help people of different backgrounds, the greater your skill sets will be.
So what are you waiting for? Get out there and help others grow their dreams today, and don’t be surprised when your own dreams grow in the process.
Michelle LaBrosse is an entrepreneurial powerhouse with a penchant for making success easy, fun, and fast. She is the founder of Cheetah Learning, a global firm employing more than 100 people that specializes in combining accelerated learning and project management to help people achieve their goals faster than they ever before imagined. She is the author of the Cheetah Success Series, and a prolific blogger whose mission is to bring project management to the masses. She is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Owner President Manager’s program and also holds aerospace and mechanical engineering degrees from Syracuse University and the University of Dayton.
Comments
Teching is a way of learning
Very good article. I've used that approach to win people over to the company's direction. While I was at Dana Commercial Credit, we had several people that questioned our approach for using the Baldrige criteria for performance excellence (we encouraged their dissent because we learned from it). At differet points in time, I asked some of these people to present our company's direction to new hires, or to visitors, or to managememt. In order to present th ematerial, they were forced to study and internatilze what we were trying to accomplish, and because of that, they could channel their dissention into positive ways to further improve our organization.
-Jim Beckham