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10 Proven Practices for More Productive Leadership

Leadership is a verb, and productive leadership is an art. The art part is when you use your experience and judgment to apply proven practices to the situation you are in to produce effective results.

While you can always wing it or luck into success, you can use patterns and practices to find the shortcuts and make your success more repeatable.

As a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, I’ve lead distributed teams around the world for more than ten years. I like to think of the Program Manager role as a technical entrepreneur with an interesting blend of customer, business, and technical perspective.

As a Program Manager, my job is to take on big challenges, build a team of smart people, and drive projects from cradle to grave. That includes everything from creating the vision and scope to leading the project through the initiating, planning, controlling, and closing phases.

It also means creating work breakdown structures, project plans, resource plans, risk plans, project schedules, managing budgets, dealing with and responding to changes, reporting status, and managing stakeholder expectations. One of my favorite metaphors is that the Program Manager is “the oil and the glue.”

It’s one of the toughest jobs you’ll ever love.

I’d like to share with you ten proven practices for more productive leadership. I’ve learned these from leading teams and shipping stuff in some of the most competitive, fast-paced, and toughest arenas:

Don’t Miss

1. Know what problem you are trying to solve.

This sounds simple and obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people can run around working on something but have actually lost sight of the problem they set out to solve.

If you keep the problem front and center, you exponentially increase your effectiveness. It helps you prioritize. It helps you focus. It helps you bring in the right help. It helps you ask the right questions.

If you lack clarity in the problem you are solving, then you are most likely wasting a lot of time and effort. It’s tough to hit a target when you don’t know what it is. On the flip side, you can save a lot of time and energy when you know exactly what the problem is that you are trying to solve.