Loud and Radical
Female project managers & speaking up.
I was sent this TedTalk tonight by an awesome employee. It’s called “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable” by Luvvie Ajayi Jones. It is about having the courage to speak up even when it feels uncomfortable to do so. It lead me to thinking about change management and helping people get their ducks in a row.
Luvvie calls herself “a professional troublemaker”. I can relate. Most days I feel like my only job is to make trouble with my clients and the boards I sit on. I don’t set out to do this, but I’ve committed to speaking up and having the hard conversations. Add to it that my team are female project managers, and speaking up elevates us from troublemakers to plain old bitches in many cases. It comes with the territory of making change and speaking truth, but sometimes that label doesn’t feel very good.
In the video, Jones talks about spending a year actively pursuing the things that scared her — things like jumping out of a plane. She uses the feeling of sitting on the edge of the plane just before she jumps, as analogous to the feeling just before she speaks her truth. She says that she knows she must speak these truths, that integrity and justice mean more than being silent. And you know what? She is one hundred percent correct. As she says in the video, our silence serves no one, not at the time and especially not later.
Change is hard. People want to be comfortable even when they know that the things they do cannot remain the same if they want something different. I can’t really blame them. Discomfort is, well, uncomfortable. It’s disruptive. It comes with fear and usually, in my experience, shame. ‘Tell us where we’re wrong’, they’ll say, but change is not at all about being wrong. Systems change, the system is always changing. I recommend being suspicious if you’re feeling comfortable.
“People and systems count on our silence to keep us exactly where we are.”
When it comes to change management, it is crucial that we approach with honesty and the willingness to speak up. There’s a moment in a company’s change process where the discomfort becomes too much, and leadership sometimes starts to think that how they worked before was pretty good. Team members, if you want to see change in your work environment it is so important that you speak up in support of the discomfort. We should all commit to being the little boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes fable — calling out the truth of what we see.
Getting project management in place for a company is a HUGE culture shift and moment of growth. Not every company can handle the change and discomfort, even if t’s what they say they want. A key indicator of success is the ability for team members and the project managers to become those ‘professional troublemakers’ during the process.
