Dear Fellow members, Distinguished guests,

Good morning.

Some of you may still remember that about one month ago I had given a brief speech about a project plan of inviting people to our club. Actually, I did form a project team and we did run the project for 4 weeks.

This time I am going to talk about what I have learned in the project.

The speech title is a question - Is project management against human nature?

Dear audience, do you have an answer for it? Let’s try.

Here comes my experience in this small project. As you already know, the goal of the project is to encourage project team members to invite people to our club.

As the project manager, my first thing is to form the project team.

How easy it is! You may think. Who would you choose to be your project team members? How would you invite them?

I started to fight with myself about these questions. I hoped people would join the project automatically. I waited for volunteers. Several days passed, guess how many people volunteered? Zero.

I realized that I had to do the job by myself. It is so natural to invite a friend for a dinner, but it is so hard to invite a club member to join my project. I worried about what I should do if people refused to join the project.

Anyway, I made up my mind to invite people. I invited 3 members. Guess how many of them agreed? They all agreed. Thanks a lot.

You see. Project management is against human nature even from the start. I have to conquer my fear to invite people. I could not expect people coming naturally.

After we had a project team, I had to assign tasks. As the project manage, my role is to motivate people to do things for me. Do you think this is with human nature or against human nature?

Of course, people would rather do things for themselves than for others. Human nature appears rational, doesn’t it? If I want people work for my project, I need find out their motivation in doing so.

The next step in leading a team to the successful completion of a project is to become acquainted with the members individually and understand their expertise. This is why leaders need to develop listening skills, second person perspective taking and empathy. That means learning about the power of incentives.

I understand the theory. Well, it is not easy to dig out the real motivation of my team members. This is worth another speech. Stay tuned.

Last but not least, the project closed as it should because every project should close in some way after its life cycle. I miss a big point here. Who knows what it is?

Great! Benefits! One of greatest mistakes in this project is that I had not defined the benefit when members reached their goals. My initial idea on this was that I still hope people could be self-motivated. But you see, this is against human nature. When you are the project manager, please make sure you have the right to define benefits, whatever they are, just put it on the table at the beginning of the project. This will save you a lot effort.

Let me summarize what I learned quickly.

Project management is against human nature. I have to overcome fear to form the team, I need to find out the motivation to assign tasks and I must put benefits beforehand to achieve the project goals. Just as we know, if we want ants to come, we put sugar on the floor.

Thank you.