836: How to Drive Engagement to Get Your Project Done with Anh Dao Pham

Pete Mockaitis
Anh, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Anh Dao Pham
Thank you so much for having me here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom about project leadership and high-performing teams. But, first, I think we need to hear a little about your history of writing jingles and rhymes associated with team accomplishments. What’s the story here and can you give us some examples, please?

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, this is a really silly thing. A few years ago, when I was working at Opower, I was one of the more senior leaders on the engineering team and I was asked to give the quarterly update. And the first time I gave that quarterly update, it was so dry I think everybody fell asleep, including me if I could have. But the reason it was so dry was because when you work in product development and you’re leading an engineering team, the engineering team’s accomplishments are very similar to the product update. So, the product team gives an update and then you give yours, it’s almost the same.

So, the next time I was called upon to do a quarterly update, I decided not to give the general product update and, instead, decided to write, like, a tribute to the team in a jingle format. So, I got some inspiration from The Brady Brunch tune, and then wrote a jingle about our product managers and our engineers and how they had delivered on this website product, and then got folks on the team to actually sing it during the quarterly all-hands, and it was a really big hit.

And from then on, it became kind of a tradition at Opower, so every quarterly update, they look for the jingle. We’d get a bunch of people to sing and we had some great, great things out there. And so, since then, instead of just giving normal praise or an update when I have, like, a big team accomplishment or a big milestone the team has approached, then, oftentimes, I’ll write a jingle and then I’ll recruit people to sing it.

And so, as an example, this last holiday season, instead of having, like, a big party because everybody was remote, I ended up writing 17 limericks for everybody on the team.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, limericks?

Anh Dao Pham
And I read them out like in a toast format, and it was a pretty big hit. There’s something very novel about writing a rhyme or a jingle, and I find that it’s very memorable, people really appreciate it, it shows them that you care in a very special way, and it gives people just that special feeling when being on a team.

And so, I want to tell you, I have a surprise for you, because I decided before I got on the show that I would write you a jingle…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow, thank you.

Anh Dao Pham
…just so you can see this in action. It’s actually a limerick, so here it is.

There once was a host named Pete
Whose podcast was rather sweet.
He interviewed people with tips to share
For being awesome at work everywhere.
And on top of that, he gave it all away for free.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, lovely. Thank you. That is a first 830-some episodes, first limerick. So, thank you.

Anh Dao Pham
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. Okay, cool. Well, I’m excited to dig into those kinds of tidbits, your unique flavor and spin on project goodness. You’ve got a book called Glue: How Project Leaders Create Cohesive, Engaged, High-Performing Teams, which is a great title. We like those sorts of things here. Can you tell us any particularly novel, surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about this stuff over the course of your career and putting together the book?

Anh Dao Pham
I’d say the most surprising thing is that when I set out to write Glue, I didn’t realize how much of an influence books on social psychology and happiness would be and influence on the actual content in the book. And for a few years prior to writing Glue, I was doing a little bit of soul-searching, I read a number of books on the science of happiness and different social psychologists, like Adam Grant, Angela Duckworth, Sean Achor, just a bunch of very well-known authors in that space.

And it turns out that a lot of the work that supports the science of happiness, around how to make yourself happy ends up being really applicable content for how to motivate teams. And so, in my work and in Glue, I talk a lot about the science of happiness, social psychology, and how to motivate and influence people through those same mechanisms, which I think makes that unique. And, for me, it’s most important, when I’m a leader, to help teams not only deliver but do it in a way that makes them feel fulfilled and happy at work.

And so, I think a lot of that comes through and ends up being somewhat surprising or a novel content for a leadership book you don’t typically find as many studies around the science of happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we love those here, so it’s no surprise that we have found each other. So, that’s cool. Well, then I’d love it if we could dig into some particulars. Could you start off with sort of the core message or big idea or thesis behind the book?

Anh Dao Pham
So, Glue, at the end of the day is both a project management leadership book, and the main principle behind it is that I wanted to be able to express to people how you can both manage teams and lead people in a way that makes them productive so that they deliver but also makes them really happy and inspired with their jobs, and that in turn inspires me and makes me feel better about my job.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, so let’s dig in. Now, one thing that’s intriguing is you draw a distinction between a project manager and a project leader. What is the difference and why does that matter?

Anh Dao Pham
The main distinction between a project manager and a project leader is that you don’t necessarily have to have a title in order to be a project leader. Project leaders rise up through all parts of the organization because there is a need to have somebody lead a particular initiative or a particular team. And what I find is that people often, if they don’t have, like, an ordained title in some way, feel like they don’t have the authority to act in a certain way.

So, I wanted to make the distinction between somebody who has the official title of project manager, which has, like, a specific job description associated with it, versus a person who just may have risen up in the organization and is a leader of sorts but would likely need very similar tools and tactics to be able to make their team successful.

So, at the end of the day, you can be a project leader from any part of the organization. You just have to be a person who has stepped up to lead in some capacity on a particular initiative, and I’m hoping that this book is applicable much more broadly than just anybody with a specific project manager title.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then could you kick us off with a pretty inspiring…let’s see, I’ll do that again. Well, in getting a taste of what could be possible and at stake for us if we internalized some of these best practices, could you share a cool story of a project leader who was able to see a beautiful upgrade in the results they’re able to create by following some of these principles?

Anh Dao Pham
I wanted to start with an analogy from a different industry entirely, which is basketball. And I’m actually not a basketball fan, but one of the things that I realized as I was doing research for the book, was I was talking to one of my best friends who is into basketball about the book and about some of the principles that I was talking about, about being glue, and he said, “Oh, it’s like Draymond Green. He’s a glue guy. He plays basketball.” And I’m like, “Tell me more about this.”

And it turns out that there’s a phenomenon in basketball where there are players called glue guys who are extremely valuable to the teams but they are not the people who score the most points, so it seems counterintuitive. Like, typically, when you think about a star basketball player, you think about somebody like a Michael Jordan who scores the most baskets.

In this case, these players are most valuable not because they actually score the most points, but because they are true team players. And so, when they’re on the court, what happens is the teams have a much higher likelihood to achieve success and win the games than when they’re not on the court even though they don’t actually score.

And the principles around Glue are basically the same. So, it’s not about being a leader, being out in front, getting all the credit for something, or being the star player on a particular team. It’s about looking at a team and trying to figure out what you can do to actually bolster the productivity of the team and make them feel healthier, happier, complete the team where they may have gaps. And that’s what the essence of Glue is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that sounds like something we all love to be here in terms of listeners of How to be Awesome at Your Job. And now let’s dig into some of the particulars. I love your table of contents chapter titles. They’re so enticing and captivating, so I’m just going to go right through my favorites and ask bit by bit. First, how do we build rapport quickly?

Anh Dao Pham
There are a lot of ways to build rapport quickly. And, actually, you’ll notice that my book was endorsed by Robert Cialdini. He wrote a book called Influence, which is immensely popular.

Pete Mockaitis
We’ve had him on the show and we love him. Oh, he’s so good.

Anh Dao Pham
He’s amazing. He’s amazing. There’s all these tactics that you can use that help you understand how to build rapport with people and how to influence people without actually having authority. And so, a lot of the things are very simple. Like, in Robert Cialdini’s book, he talks about just making sure that you, when you speak with a person, you actually provide a reason for what you’re asking to do.

And when you do things like that, where you ask a person to actually complete a task for you, or make a request, and you provide them a reason for the work that they’re doing, it helps them understand why their work is important, and, ultimately, build rapport and helps them trust you more. So, that’s one principle.

Another one comes from Dale Carnegie, which is really simple. It’s just using people’s names. But in a multicultural environment, and, in particular, in a remote environment, it’s even more important that you use people’s names and that you also get their pronunciations correctly and that you know how to spell their names correctly. These are small things but they make a really big difference in building rapport with a particular person.

And then another type is, just make sure that you’re accessible and approachable. So, if you have a team that you’re trying to get know, maybe arrange some sort of social situation where you can get to know them better, take some time at the beginning of your meetings to pause a little bit, have some informal conversation to warm up, talk about their weekend. Make them feel like they’re people not just a person who’s actually completing a task but somebody you genuinely care about and are interested in. Those are the best things that you can do to start building rapport.

And then the final thing, which is something that I get quoted on a lot is I call the candy bowl, the magical candy bowl, and you’ll see this in the book title, or in the chapter title, where I always keep a candy bowl on my desk. And the reason that I do that is because it sort of embodies a bunch of these principles. It makes me approachable in the sense that it gives people a reason to actually come to my desk and talk to me.

Oftentimes, people actually come to my desk and then take candy when I’m not there, but it establishes me as a giver. So, even if I wasn’t there, they remember, “Anh has a candy bowl on her desk and I can come get it whenever I want.” And if I then talk to them later, even if we haven’t had a conversation, it actually creates a certain amount of equity with them, like I’ve deposited something in their virtual piggybank. And if I go talk to them later, they already have a warm feeling associated with me because I’ve given them something whether or not I know it.

And so, that to me is like a very classic trick, and I have always had a candy bowl on my desk since I can remember.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. I’ve got a couple follow-up questions there, Anh. One is what candies are the fan favorites, perennial, time after time?

Anh Dao Pham
Branded chocolate goes the fastest.

Pete Mockaitis
Anytime, like KitKat or Snickers or anything.

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, Hershey’s, Snickers, Reese’s Pieces, anything that’s branded. I would try generic chocolate, like Palmers, during the holidays, when you get the Easter eggs and things like that, they don’t go quite as fast. But anything that’s like, yeah, KitKat, Reese’s, M&Ms, chocolate M&Ms, those go really fast. And it’s kind of my own experiment over the years, that’s something you see, what type of snack actually goes the fastest.

And there’s something interesting about the amount of candy that you put in the bowl as well. This is such a random nuance. But if you put too much candy in the bowl, especially if, let’s say, I get a brand-new bag of chocolate, and I dump the whole thing in the bowl, it goes faster. There’s something about the idea that there’s just a lot of candy that people come and take a handful of it, but if I ration it and put it out in smaller segments, then it tends to last a lot longer. People will come and take one or two rather than a handful. So, very interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
I absolutely noticed this phenomenon with, well, I was thinking, like, just drinking water in terms of if I have a big vessel of water, I will take bigger gulps more frequently versus if I’ve got a bottle of water in my last thirst, “Ooh, we better be sparing,” even though there’s more not too far away. It just gets inside you. That’s good.

Well, Anh, my next follow-up question is, when it comes to using names, how much is too much? Sometimes I feel like I hold myself back more than I need to, Anh. And so, now I’m just going to try a little bit right now, and you tell me when it feels excessive. I’m thinking when you address someone, of course, it just makes sense, or when you’re wrapping something up, like, “Thank you, Anh.” I guess every sentence would be too much. Do you have a sense for how much is too much when it comes to name use?

Anh Dao Pham
There probably is a too much. Like, yeah, I’d say every sentence is probably too much. But if you go back to what Dale Carnegie said, and I reference this in the book, the sound of a person’s name is the sweetest sound to them. So, if you can use it tastefully, in particular, if you can use it to address a person when you’re prompting them for a question, so I think that’s really important.

Addressing a particular person, addressing or acknowledging something that somebody said so that they understand that you actually heard them, those two, I think, are the most critical times to say a person’s name so that they really feel like you’re making a connection with them.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And I’m thinking about my buddy and mentor, Mawi, episode number one, he will insert my name right in the middle of sentences, and more than most people I know, and I really like it. He’ll say, “You know what we discovered, Pete…” and I’ll be like, “Well, what? What did you discover?” It’s like you have galvanized my attention, and I want to know even more.

And if I happen to be drifting, I really do feel, like, “Oh, I should be paying attention. He’s talking directly to me even though, of course, he was. We are really the only two people at this lunch.” But it has an effect, it’s a good one. Thank you.

Anh Dao Pham
Exactly. And then I think, in particular, if you’re working in a remote environment, using people’s names is extremely important. A lot of times, people have their cameras off, and if you use their name, they know you’re speaking directly to them even if they can’t see you. So, I think it is an even more important tool to be using now than it has been in the past.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And another table of contents prompt so juicy, what is the essential question to getting any project moving?

Anh Dao Pham
“What are the next steps?” It’s the most powerful question that you can ask. At the end of every meeting, if you leave and you don’t ask that question, you’re going to find that you’re going to be less productive on all of your projects. And so, if there’s no other question that you ask, if you’re silent the whole meeting as a facilitator, in the very end you make sure to ask, “What are the next steps? Who’s going to be doing them?” and then capture that information, you will be able to move your project forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. This reminds me of David Allen, for individuals getting things done, “What is the next action?” And it’s just magic how it gets stuff unstuck. And sometimes it’s so simple, it’s like, “Oh, I guess we got to look at our calendars to see when these three people can get together.” Like, “Oh, okay. Well, that’s not so hard. Let’s just go ahead and do that.”

Anh Dao Pham
Exactly. And I think if you’re doing any sort of leadership, in particular, project leadership, your goal really is to always be making progress. So, even if it’s small, as long as you’re moving the project forward with something like, “I know what the very next step is,” it doesn’t have to be the next ten steps, just the very next one, you’re going to continue to move everybody forward and make progress against your goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. Now, everybody asks you to teach a particular skill, which I would not have guessed – it’s notetaking. What’s up with that? Why does notetaking matter? And how can you do it in a way that is differentiated-ly excellent that matters?

Anh Dao Pham
I am very passionate about notetaking. This is one of the strange traits about me, and most people, almost everybody who’s encountered me even briefly at work, knows this about me. It’s something that’s actually, to me, a cornerstone of my success in my career. I take avid notes, I type very fast, I take avid notes almost on every call or meeting that I have, even if I’m not going to publish them, because it’s part of my learning process.

And the reason that people ask me about it is because I often publish those notes out. So, as a part of my learning process, when I’m learning more information, I tend to take them. And I don’t just sort of listen to things verbatim. I listen to things and then I rephrase them as I’m typing them, or I try to reorganize them. So, when I was in college, I learned, like, you could take…if you take notes in outline format, your retention of that information is so much higher than if you just sort of listen to something coming in one ear and then typing it out verbatim what people had said.

So, what I started to do was sort of reorganize the information, put it in such a way that it is summarized, and then send all that information out and broadcast it to people so that they know that they’ve been heard, they know whose action is next, what the next steps are, all of the things that were important as a part of those discussion get captured, codified, and then broadcasted.

And it is possible to be significantly better at taking notes than another person in the sense that if you take really good notes, in particular, in today’s environment when you’re managing a lot of projects, some things are moving very fast, a lot of things don’t get documented. So, oftentimes, a good set of notes is the document that explains what happened and ends up being a system of record for any decision-serving needs.

So, if you become that person who takes really good notes and people know that, you start to just have a certain amount of power because you hold this information and people see you as a person who has access to this information very readily. The other thing about it is, like I said before, if I take good notes, then I learn more than almost anybody else in the conversation. It just crystallizes my memory for it so that when people ask me about it later, I have much greater recall ability.

And when it’s summarized in that fashion, I once had a person tell me he went home after my meeting, and told his wife, “These notes were better than the meeting,” because a lot of times, meetings will meander back and forth.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Anh Dao Pham
But if you kind of like consolidate the information under certain bullets, you can read this nice summary, it refreshes your memory and you know exactly where to go after that. So, yeah, those to me are the big key traits around taking good notes, is making sure that they’re organized, making sure that they track, capture what’s most important as a part of the conversation, and that you share them out so that people know you have access to them and can refer back to them.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, we might have to do a full follow-up episode if you’re down to talking about notetaking, because if it’s your superpower, and no one else has brought that up as their superpower, and it’s yielding value, that’s certainly cool. So, I’ll just restrain myself to a couple follow-ups for this conversation.

Anh Dao Pham
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’re not just verbatim writing all the things you hear, but you’re rather trying to get some organization outlined to it. So, when I hear the word outline, I could think of a very strict “Roman numeral one. Indent, capital A. Further indent, Arabic numeral one.” So, that’s like a very formal, like when I’m learning how to write a paper in grade school, outline. Is that what you mean by outline in terms of the transformation that you’re mentally processing stuff as you outline?

Anh Dao Pham
No, actually, it doesn’t have to be. If that’s really comfortable for you, or your word processing application automatically numbers things for you, I think it’s fine, but it’s more important that you sort of categorize information. So, if a topic meanders, as an example, sometimes, let’s say we talk about notetaking now, and then five more minutes, it comes back again.

What I would do is have a topic of notetaking in my notes, and then I would put a couple of bullets from the first part of the conversation, and then in the second part, I would move that up so that it’s in the same section. So, when somebody is skimming it, they can see all of the takeaways all together at the same time.

And it’s not so important that you have, like, a strict way of taking the notes. It’s that you’ve summarized the information. And what’s even more critical is that you summarize the information in your own words. So, don’t try to take notes verbatim as somebody said them. Try to restate them in your own words so that it comes out more naturally and to confirm that you actually understood what it was that was being said.

Because, oftentimes, when people speak, it doesn’t make for eloquent or concise writing, so if you’ve summarized it in a good way, then people can read it, get the takeaways very quickly, rather than trying to skim through all the uhms and ahhs that actually come out in a conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. And to give us a taste, can we find a sample of your notetaking somewhere?

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, in the book, I actually put a few samples, one of the worst notes or no notes at all. So, if you just take basic notes, it’s still better than no notes. The second tier up is, at least, capture the key decisions and action items and who’s responsible for them. So, there’s a sample of what that looks like, then there’s sort of the next layer of fidelity, which is capturing a few key decisions in a little bit more detail. And then there’s sort of a more robust version of those notes.

And the sample I gave is from, like, a home remodeling project, which may have been overkill for a home remodeling project, but at least gives you an idea of the types of things that you would want to capture. Some of the salient points in the conversation that you might want to have for context later, those are the types of things that you might want to capture if you were taking really robust notes.

And, in particular, the why behind decisions. So, if you’re capturing just the decision but not why, if you take those in your notes, it again helps you understand it, and then it also helps you convey that information to other people.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And I imagine it might vary a bit, but just to give us a bit of reference, if there’s a 30-minute meeting, which might have a word count of 4,500-ish words – that’s a lot of podcast ads experience talking right there, 150 words per minute – how many words or pages might your notes end up being?

Anh Dao Pham
It really depends on how efficient the conversation was. So, it could be that you had a 30-minute meeting but you swirled around talking about different options and deliberating them and debating them. In the end, your summary may have been as concise as maybe half a page, you said, “We talked about option one, option two, option three. We made this decision and this is why.” It could be that concise. And so, it doesn’t have to be verbose, it just has to capture the most salient points.

Now, sometimes you have a meeting, like I had one with one of my managers this morning, and we covered 15 topics, and it was 30 minutes, and it was, like, “Bullet. Here’s what we discussed. Bullet. Here’s what we discussed.” And that one ended up being more than a page long just for me to sort of capture those points.

So, I think it really depends on how much ground you cover. It’s not so much what your word count is but what were the most important things that you needed to capture and what’s the most concise way to capture them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share with us the three levers to keep your project on time and on track?

Anh Dao Pham
Sure. So, this is actually the one thing in the book that does sort of follow classical project management. There are really three things: it’s scope, meaning how much you’re actually trying to achieve in a particular project; time, which is the amount of time it’s going to take; and then resources, which could be either money or the number of people working on a particular project. That’s like the classic triangle of constraints for any project management course you would see.

And when you’re managing a project, it’s really important for you to understand what levers you actually have available to you. And so, if there is something that ends up being a gotcha or surprise, which always happens, no project ever goes as planned, then you can look to see which of these constraints are movable. And the easiest thing typically to do is to increase your timeline but, oftentimes, if you increase your timeline on a project too often or too much, then people fatigue of the project and they feel like it’s not successful, so you want to use that very sparingly.

The next is resources. If you have any resources, you can throw at a project, or if you can clear things off of a plate of a person who’s on the project so that they’re not splintered, then you can get more capacity. That’s always a good way to go about doing things. And then scope is something that people forget is negotiable.

Because even if people say at the very beginning of a project the scope is not negotiable, the closer you get to launching your project, the scope gets much more malleable, and that’s for two reasons. One is that people are more or less willing to actually yield on things that they want very early in the process. And the second is that the closer you get to launching a particular project, the more clear you are about what you’re trying to achieve.

And so, things that seem like they may have been very important at the beginning tend to be more negotiable or more malleable towards the end. So, I like to lean on scope first, then resources, then time if possible.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. I’m familiar with the triangle and the constraints. I learned that in college, and it was an eye-opener, and I love, Anh, those extra layers and considerations and weightings that you put on them. So, handy stuff. I’m just going to keep rolling through your excellent table of contents. Chapter 13, how do we communicate what’s most important?

Anh Dao Pham
Through every medium possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Anh Dao Pham
And this sounds funny, this is sort of like your question, “How much is too much when you’re using my name?” How much is too much when you’re articulating a goal? It’s almost never too much. And the reason is because people are very focused on their individual tasks, and it’s very easy for them to lose sight of what’s going on for a bigger picture.

So, if you’re trying to orient somebody against a goal, then what you want to do is, first, make sure that the goal is clear and unambiguous, everybody understands what it is. Then, second, articulate it in writing, verbally. If you want to plaster it on a wall, like, do whatever you can to broadcast the goal and do it in multiple mediums, and to reinforce it almost every chance you get.

I had a very funny example where I was marching towards a big project, and every day at the very beginning of the scrum, which is the meeting that we had for everybody, getting together to check in on status every day, I had a slide at the very beginning before we actually went to scrum that said how many days were left to the goal, till the launch date.

And so, 15, 14, 13, counting down every day. And two times, very close to launch date, I think I remember it was like five days to launch date, somebody pulled me aside, and was like, “Wait, when are we launching again?” And I realized, and so I just very politely said, “We’re launching in five days. This is the date.”

And it’s funny because people learn through different mediums. Some people are audio learners, so if you say it to them, they actually get it. Some people are visual, so if you broadcast it visually in some way, that’s when they get it. Some people need those things reinforced and some people actually need to say it themselves.

So, if you really want to know if somebody has actually ingested and internalized your goal, you can ask them to say it back to you, and only when they’ve actually articulated that you know for sure that they actually understood it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. And I guess you have to be careful with that so that it does not seem, I don’t know, patronizing or condescending.

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, I think you have to just take the request and respond to them, and know that you’re going to be repeating yourself a lot but that it’s just totally expected. And as long as you’re always tying it back to work that people are doing, they’re not going to feel like it’s too much.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right, Anh, let’s hear Chapter 14. “When is your project done?” It’s not when I think. Do tell.

Anh Dao Pham
This chapter is actually about the principle of taking ownership on a project. And one of the things that I think is a big misconception is people put together a project plan when they start a new project, and there’s typically a launch date at the end, and that’s what you’re marching towards. So, let’s say you’ve got a three-month project, you’re launching towards the launch date.

And then at the end of the launch date, people feel like their project is done but that is not the case because, oftentimes, like I said, maybe you’re marching through that launch date and you looked at all these constraints because there were some sort of crazy surprise that happened, and now you’ve started to cut scope. And I like to call cutting scope very close to the launch date as roadkill. This was like roadkill on the path to getting to my goal. I started pushing things to the side, and saying, “Not critical. Not critical.”

So, once you’ve launched, there typically is, like, a number of things that still need to be happening in order for you to make your project a success. It can’t just be launch and sort of out on the ether. You need to go back and take care of all of the things that you don’t need in this roadkill along the way. Maybe you need to do additional communication to people who were stakeholders but maybe impacted after the fact.

So, a key example here is if you work in product development, or if you’re launching any sort of product or new thing, oftentimes, there are people who have to support that new thing once it’s out. So, it’s not just like making the feature available or the new product available, it’s also about making sure that the people who are going to need to support that are trained and have all the answers that they need to be able to do that in a sustained fashion, or there’s a place to ask later when there’s an issue with whatever that is that you’ve just released.

And so, all these things happen after a project launch date, but the project launch date is most commonly focused on as the end of your project. And so, in the chapter, I talk about this, it’s not so much that there are steps that you can do to say when your project is done. It’s more about an attitude. If you take ownership of a project as a project leader, and you think of yourself almost like the CEO of your project, then you don’t limit yourself to the scope of work that’s already been defined or what’s been defined to you by your title.

So, if you’re a product manager in my world, I might say, like, “Well, my goal is to define the product and get it out there.” But if I want it to be a success, I might have to do things that are beyond the launch date, beyond the scope of my role. And so, if you really think of yourself as an owner, and that you are paramount to this project’s success, then you will look to see what else needs to be done after the launch date. And until those things are completed, you’ll know that your job is not done.

The other thing is, always plan a celebration when you hit a big milestone. Don’t forget the tail end of a big project. It’s not done until you celebrate it with your team.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Anh, tell me, any final thoughts you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Anh Dao Pham
Sure. I’d say, at the end of the day, leading projects and leading people is not cookie cutter, and I think this is probably the biggest thing that’s not fully articulated this way in the book but, hopefully, is a big key takeaway for people. Most of the things that I do are very people-driven. I’m most worried about boosting productivity for the people on my team, and I do whatever it takes to make that happen.

So, every project, every team is custom, and you’re different, the way that you add your perspective to a team is different. And so, I would like to warn people against sort of blindly following checklists, and, instead, to think about ways that you can customize your approach based off the team’s needs and what you’re trying to accomplish, and the personalities on the team. And know that if you do that, you’re going to be a lot more successful than somebody who is just trying to apply some set of rules blindly without thinking them through.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Anh Dao Pham
Yes. From one of my favorite books on happiness, What Happy People Know by Dan Baker and Cameron Stauth, the quote is, “We don’t describe the world we see. We see the world we describe.” And I love this because it’s very telling about human thoughts, in the sense that we often think that things are dictated to us, but, in fact, we actually have a lot of power to transform our worlds based off of what we call ourselves.

So, if you call yourself a project manager versus a project leader, that makes a really big difference in how you actually translate your role and your sense of ownership. And so, I love that quote because every time I feel like I’m being limited by the way that I’m calling myself something or the way that I’m framing a particular scenario, I try to reframe it to see if I can change the way that the world is reacting to me.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot. And I don’t know where I borrowed this phrase. I got it from a job description which I thought was funny. I think it said one of the requirements was to “Provide visionary leadership.”

Anh Dao Pham
Like it’s so easy.

Pete Mockaitis
And just like that, and I thought, “All right, what’s on my to-do list today? Okay, provide visionary leadership. Check.” But I found that when I say that to myself, like, “Okay, I’m going to write a bunch of emails to my team and the collaborators, right,” it’s like, okay, so one view is, “Okay, that’s a thing that’s got to get out the door, a bunch of emails. Check, check, check.”

Versus if I say to myself, and I’m kind of joking and I’m kind of being highfalutin for the fun of it, it’s like, “All right, on my to-do list is to provide visionary leadership on these course adaptations.” And then, sure enough, I really do feel more jazzed about it, and really do spend some more time providing useful feedback and direction that is more enriching for folks.

So, yeah, how I describe that to-do list item really does shape how I perform it even though I was kind of joking.

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, there are studies about this. It’s called jobcasting where you take your job, and you try to put it in a bigger context. So, for example, you’re a podcast host, you could say, “My job is to create podcasts,” or you could say your job is to put more information out in the world so that you can help people all over the world be better at their jobs. The second one is going to be so much more inspiring than the first, right?

So, the way that you frame what you’re doing has a very tangible impact on your perspective and how motivated you are going to be to do that job. So, I think that that’s so insightful, and the fact that you actually have the power to change your own perception by describing it differently, I think, is just phenomenal.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Anh Dao Pham
Now, this is a hard one because a lot of your prior guests have cited lots of great studies, and so I was trying to find one that I felt was unique. And I ended up landing on a study that Sean Achor, who’s the author of The Happiness Advantage, did to himself, which I think about all the time. And it’s a very novel study about what it takes to adopt new habits versus what it takes to deter yourself from stopping…or to deter yourself from continuing to do old habits that are not so good for you, and he calls it the 20-second rule.

And the experiment goes like this. He wanted to play his guitar more often. And so, he had a guitar that he bought, it was in his closet. And he decided to see if he removed the friction from playing the guitar by just buying a stand and then putting the guitar out in the middle of the room, whether or not he would actually play his guitar more often.

And it turns out, just the additional friction of getting off of the couch, going over to the closet, getting the guitar out reduces the amount of time that he would actually play on the guitar. So, he had a lot of success in just moving it from one location to another. And then he did another experiment which I thought was so funny.

He had a remote control that he typically used to leave on his couch so that when he watched television, it’s there. That’s what everybody does. Their remote control is right on the television, so you plop down on the couch and got it, and then you turn it on. But he wanted to stop watching as much television and, instead, read more books.

So, what he did was he took the batteries out of his remote control, and he put them in a drawer that was a few feet away, and he said he timed himself. It took him about 20 seconds if he were to get up out of the couch, go to the drawer, put the batteries in and close the remote control to start using it. And his goal was to see if he created that little additional friction if he would stop watching television as much.

And so, what he found was he did. He stopped watching television as much because he was sort of inherently lazy in that additional 20 seconds. The friction actually caused him to pick up the book that was, like, right within arms’ reach on the couch rather than watch television. So, I find that to be like a fantastic study. And in my real life, I use it both at home as well as at work when I think about why people are not responding to me or not able to complete a different task that I asked them to do.

I see, “Is there a way that I can make their job easier?” So, for example, if you ask people very open-ended questions, it’s difficult for them to answer because they have to craft a response from scratch. But if you give them statements that they have to react to, that takes a lot less brain power so you can be much more effective at getting responses that way.

Another example is in my home life. My husband is 6’2” and I’m 5’4” and so I love Post-Its, I put them…write things on them all the time as a reminder I want to give him. There’s one trick that I have done more recently and that is very effective. It’s when I have a reminder for him, and not me, I write it on a Post-It and then I put it at his eye level, not mine. And just by writing with it being right in front of him instead of right in front of where I would be, he has a much harder time missing it, and knows it’s for him.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And a favorite book?

Anh Dao Pham
A favorite book, this is really hard. I’ve just quoted What Happy People Know by Dan Baker and Cameron Stauth. That’s one of my all-time favorites in terms of happiness as well as The Happiness Advantage. And then in terms of non-self-help or happiness books, I recently enjoyed a couple of memoirs. I really liked Untamed by Glennon Doyle, and then also Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a particular nugget you’re known for, something that people quote back to you often?

Anh Dao Pham
Outside of notetaking and the candy bowl effect?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s plenty really.

Anh Dao Pham
I’d say, yeah, those are nuggets. The one thing about the book that’s actually been very controversial and has come up quite a bit is I do have a chapter about planning where I state that I believe plans are optional. And this is almost like sacrilege for the project management community, but it’s created a lot of controversy.

And it’s not so much that I’m against planning. It’s that, like I said before, I’m against people following things blindly and doing things for the sake of doing them, rather than doing things with specific intention. And so, I challenge the notion that every single project needs to have, like, a detailed project plan. Instead, if you’re looking for ways to boost team productivity, tailor a process to your team, plan when your team needs a plan, and be thoughtful about it. That, to me, has been like a really insightful takeaway that most people have come back to me and ask me about, and particularly controversial.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Anh Dao Pham
I’d love it if folks could find me at my website, it’s www.GlueLeaders.com. Pretty easy to find. You can contact me there, find everything about the book, and also a link to this podcast once it’s available.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, actually. I was listening to your podcast, and I think it was episode 830 with Dr. Waldinger where he cited a Gallup quote that I also cited in my book about making friends and making best friends at work, and how that increases both productivity as well as enjoyment. And if you take nothing else away from all this, there’s a lot of little tactics and tricks that you can do to build rapport, be more organized, take notes. But, at the end of the day, to me, the most rewarding thing at work is when you make personal connections.

And so, what I would love to advocate people do is don’t just think of your job as a job. Think of it as a way to make meaningful connections with people, and to accomplish great things together, and bring part of yourself to work. And the reason that I started writing jingles is because I like to rhyme, and it’s silly, but it’s very uniquely me. And if you love to cook, maybe organize potlucks. If you love ping-pong, maybe organize a ping-pong tournament.

My husband and I like to play poker, and so now we’re thinking about combining my love of cooking Vietnamese soups and poker with a “pho”ker night. So, those are things that you can do to bring to your workers, and it makes it more rewarding when you actually create genuine friendships, and then accomplish things together. So, what I would say is find ways to connect with people at work, make friends, and in doing so, hopefully, both your job as well as your coworkers’ jobs will be more rewarding.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anh, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun and good glue.

Anh Dao Pham
Thank you. So nice to meet you.