Skool Daze (days 2 and 3)

Yesterday was a jam-packed day that we spent learning about stakeholder management. I've been working on projects for decades now and I never realized just how much there was to this topic alone. We went deep and I was quite glad for it. At the end, I was so exhausted that I pretty much collapsed into bed and didn't have the energy to even get up, so no posting yesterday.

Today was spent on brain theory and communications models. This isn't a part of PMI's curriculum, or at least it isn't to the best of my knowledge. It was quite interesting and although I don't buy all of it, there's certainly quite a few points worth looking at. What I wasn't expecting and realized with a start halfway through today is that we're being taught not just the PMP curriculum but also how to lead. Not just lead a homogeneous group of people but how to motivate and lead a diverse group of people, which is what we'd find in our workplace anyway.

I grew up in a very traditional lead-from-the-front paradigm and have been doing that for most of my life. Today, I'm starting to learn how to lead my team effectively from any configuration. It'll take some getting used to as there's a lot of variance but I think I'm starting to understand the difference between an ineffective leader vs an effective one. It's...a little mindbending to say the least. We're also starting to get into leadership ethics, which I think should be taught in all management classes.

All in all, I'm really glad I took this route instead of learning on my own off a book or via one of those cram-everything-in-a-week courses. The university's heritage of having being a naval academy is coming through really clearly and it's resonating strongly with me. I wrote in my personal statement that the university required for admission into any of their postgraduate programs that I didn't just want an accreditation, I wanted to learn how to lead and manage project teams well. Looks like I chose wisely.