Ok, “fun” may be a stretch…but not really. When do we dislike our jobs the most? When they are dead ends. When we’re micro-managed. When we don’t feel leadership is leading us. When we feel that we aren’t given the tools or authority to succeed.

I’ve had one or more positions where all of this happened….maybe not all in one job (though I can think of one specific job that encompassed most of these). I’m sure we all can think of a job where we were pushed down and we were unhappy. We tend to not be at our most productive selves in these types of jobs and under these types of conditions.

I’ve always found that I am at my most productive when the work is fun and when I have a great deal of control over that work. The same goes for the projects that I lead. If I have executive management that has a great deal of confidence in my skills and basically lets me run the show with the understanding I’ll shout out when there are needs as well as keeping them up-to-date on status, then I usually truly enjoy.

Companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time, Gallup finds.

Gallup has found that one of the most important decisions companies make is simply whom they name manager. Yet our analytics suggest they usually get it wrong. In fact, Gallup finds that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time.

Bad managers cost businesses billions of dollars each year, and having too many of them can bring down a company. The only defense against this problem is a good offense, because when companies get these decisions wrong, nothing fixes it. Businesses that get it right, however, and hire managers based on talent will thrive and gain a significant competitive advantage.

Many project decisions are made by other people that affect you and your career as a project management professional, and often these decisions are about risk. Decisions about budgets, assignments, team allocations or priorities can significantly change the risk profile of the project. But just because these vital decisions are taken by others, it does not mean that you cannot influence the outcome. Project management professionals have to know how to influence decisions in a way that minimises the risk to their projects and themselves. We have to identify, analyse, and mitigate these risks to get optimal project results. How can we use our influencing skills to deal with risks that arise from the decisions of others?

Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on decision-making. Kahneman described a set of mental shortcuts that affect how people make difficult decisions in uncertain situations. Project management professionals can take advantage of these factors when seeking to influence important and risky project decisions.