Why rolling a PDS requires leadership (even if you’re the most junior person in the room
/I listened to a fascinating podcast the other day that described everyone in a business as ‘democracies of one’. That is, the boss can deliver whatever edicts they like, but at the end of the day, everyone in the business has a choice as to whether to follow them. The boss therefore, sets the long term agenda, and each person decides if they are going to get on board.
Which made me think of PDSs. As the person who’s responsible for rolling the PDS, you are indeed setting the agenda, the timing, and the goal. Well, you could be. It’s up to you.
It’s a funny thing, project management. From one perspective, it looks suspiciously like being a secretary – booking meetings, taking minutes, following people up ‘please please PLEASE will you read this draft!!!’ – but from a different perspective, it’s an opportunity to impact your colleagues and your customers, and that my friends, is leadership.
So, what does PDS management as leadership look like?
Firstly, great leaders set a clear goal, and set out why it’s worth achieving. By providing context you are helping the people around you to link their effort to a business goal (in this case, keeping the lights on and not getting in the sh*t with ASIC!). And yes, while everyone around you in theory knows that’s why you roll PDSs, it really is worth setting out some project goals before you start.
With PDSs, you might also have goals like:
3 drafts only
No outstanding issues before final DDC meeting
Everyone provides evidence and verification certificates by X date
Everyone reviews docs during business hours (ie no-one is trying to review highly regulated, high risk documents at 9pm after a full day of work)
If you set these out up front, and ask everyone to agree to them, you’re setting yourself (and everyone else) up for success. Plus this makes PDS rolls more positive, and less a never-ending stream of ‘please can you just read the email I sent you and sign off on your sections!’.
Secondly, leaders think long term. PDSs can easily end up a case of ‘just do enough to get the damn things out the door’, but this approach means that the quality just gradually slides downwards, which often eventuates in ‘we need a rewrite’ and who’s got time for that??
So rather than bare minimum, think ‘bare minimum plus a few tweaks that will set us up for success long term’. These might include:
Moving content from an 8page PDS into an AIB BEFORE you’re having ridiculous discussions about just how tiny the margins can be
Doing an out of cycle review of text that’s used across multiple documents and hasn’t really been reviewed in detail for years. For instance, investment risks, how to apply, privacy, tax, to name a few.
And lastly, leaders are prepared to make difficult trade-offs and hard decisions. While you personally might not be able to make a final call, you can certainly encourage others to do, even if it means booking a meeting to bring two senior people together to sort something out rather than letting them duke it out via comments in a word doc.
Conversely, sometimes it might mean standing up to someone much more senior than you. If some content belongs to one area, but someone senior from another area is trying to rewrite it, you might need to gently redirect them back to their areas of sign off. And in other cases, you might need to take the new improved text to the owner of that content to ask them to re-review and sign off.
In summary though, it’s up to you. Realistically, the PDSs will probably still get rolled on time, even if you just take orders from everyone and work yourself to the bone. But there is a much better way, and it’s in your hands.
I’m always intrigued that two people can look at exactly the same job, and one sees ‘order taker’ and the other sees ‘opportunity to make an impact’. It’s your choice which way to go.
What do you think? Are there other opportunities for leadership that I’ve missed? Join the conversation below and let me know what you think.