A couple of key questions arise: Who are you really? How valid is your determination of your strengths and weaknesses?Ī CEO I worked for many years ago helped distill the concept of personal mastery when he said to me, “You can try to get me to change my habits and my quirks, but it’s a waste of time trying to get me to change my character flaws.” We can all sand the rough edges and stop saying things that people find annoying, but we can’t fundamentally change who we are. Once you've done this (and I wouldn’t spend more than two hours doing it), the next step is to question why you’ve classified your strengths and weaknesses as you have. We’ve all done SWOT reviews on projects, but in this case, we’ll be turning the lens on ourselves. So it makes sense to begin with a SWOT review-an assessment of our strengths, weaknesses, current opportunities, and a determination of what situations in our life are bringing out the worst in us, both professionally and personally (threats). To the nimble project manager, the concept of personal mastery translates into a complex weave of self-knowledge, the cultivation and refinement of a wide number of skills, and the personal commitment to support a similar growth in others. Mah is also the root of the French word maitre, which means proficient or highly skilled. The word mastery derives from the Sanskrit word mah, meaning greater. Over the next few articles, I'm going to discuss how each of these core disciplines plays into the skills that define the nimble project manager.Īlthough no single discipline is more important than any other, one logical place to start exploring these ideas is with the concept of personal mastery. From the perspective of the nimble project manager, a project environment is the ultimate learning organization-and Senge’s disciplines provide an easy-to-use and robust conceptual framework for approaching every project. In the book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge identifies five core disciplines required of a learning organization: personal mastery, shared vision, mental models, team learning, and systems thinking.