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Niki Lambropoulos

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Niki Lambropoulos

Project Manager

Current job profile

I am a Project and Team Manager responsible for the Educational European Projects for the schools and teachers in Western Greece; we have 13,000 teachers and 1,200 schools under our jurisdiction as the third major region in Greece. I work with Dr. Giorgos Panagiotopoulos, the Director of the Regional Directorate of Primary and Secondary Education in Western Greece (PDEDE), which belongs to the Greek Ministry of Education, Religious Affairs, Culture and Sports. My job is to ensure European funding for the schools each academic year and also participate in European projects as PDEDE as such. I also work within European projects, especially in project management areas such as project management as such, quality and risks management and mainly, innovation management. Lastly, I cooperate with the University of Patras, with Prof. Fakotakis’ Team at the Wire Communications Lab. My activities require continuous creativity and innovation and good personal relationships for the proposals and projects to be successful. My current job is very challenging and satisfying at the same time, always allowing space for improvements especially in a constantly altering environment right now in Greece.

Leadership qualities

I think the most important skill is to listen carefully to people’s needs and hearts and act appropriately, this is being socially competent. Then we act as a whole, as the fish in the sea that move all together. Then the impact comes easily. The leader’s job is about being able to unleash this human potential and ideas for production via different means; see for example the creativity and different aspects of the world the smart phones provided. It is about understanding, defining and changing the worldview, and this is possible by a new communicating device.
Such challenging job requires even more diverse skills including empathy as the ability to feel the state of the other person, efficiency as the ability to perform, effectiveness as the ability to fulfil specific objectives, accountability, creating sustainable impact on a personal, social, cultural, spatial and temporal level. And being responsive rather than reactive.

Ensuring growth

I think the two most important things I do is to be very close to people who are better than me, in any way, and to not allow my ego to increase walls around me and around other people. In the first case I ‘steal’ people’s abilities via empathy, synchronising with them and try to understand their way of seeing and understanding of how the worlds works, so to increase my perception. And obviously I enjoy their company!! In the second case, especially in a job that requires public exposition, the moment anyone thinks that s/he the centre of the world, the game is lost by definition. This is because the leader loses the leading skill; to listen and respond. And also this person stops learning which means he loses the beneficial interaction with other people.

My advice

If this young person knows the field of work she or he is enthusiastic about already, then start from the bottom. This is to know exactly the ways the mechanisms work and click together and most importantly the environmental culture. For example, it is not helpful to increase the timetable in an environment where the people drink coffee and chat. They will extend this according to the timetable. It is better to find some other incentives, in fact, leave earlier if they finished they work in the most excellent way. We need to think human resources as a family leaving together some time during the day and help each other, correcting each other’s mistakes to achieve our visions and targets.
Also in most cases, it is never what you observe or some other times is so apparent that you cannot see it. Another example, you see a successful boss; but it could be an intelligent husband or wife, a dedicated employee, the most productive team, or else, and not the actual person who appears to have the leadership ability. These are leaders with crouches. In order to believe in one’s leadership ability, this person needs to experience the actual jobs and be in the most difficult cases she or he will have to work on afterwards. This requires a lot of guts. But this experiential vibration stays with you for ever!

Doing things right

If the skill for sensitivity to people’s needs exists, every other skill the literature refers to appears naturally in both a macro and micro level. It is easy to understand the macro level, big dreams, projects, constructions etc. However, it is also the micro level, as the English say ‘the devil is in the details’ and also the Indian writer Arundhati Roy refers to ‘The God of Small Things’. In the first case it is about finding the definite tiny mistakes and gaps that will create a catastrophic butterfly effect to the whole project. In the second case it is about understanding the mechanics of how the pluming of a project –or even the world- works and being able to turn, click or press in appropriate way so to accelerate processes and making actions more efficient and effective saving time by being proactive.
In project management we say that we work from the future backwards; we visualise the successful project and we see how the steps go back to the initial conditions to create this success. In this way we change the course of project before it even happens.
Now in personal, I do not have the perfect personal life because I work a lot! But with people, I observe the environment around me to find links to things, situations and the person. Sometimes these are very vivid and obvious, some others they do not exist and they are only in our mind. When I see them, I stay close to the person and situation as much as I can. I think these coincidences are not actually coincidences; they are magical links between us and the actual world.

Influenced by

There are many people who have influenced me; in fact everyone around us influences us, one way or another. However, I can refer to my grandmother who raised me and taught me how to pray. Also my three teachers who dragged me from a level zero as a scientist and human being and brought me to enlightening levels. There are my supervisors, Dr Xristine Faulkner and Prof. Fintan Culwin at London South Bank University in London, where I finished my PhD. It is hard to find high technical scientific, human and teaching expertise at the same time on such high level. And also my Yoga Sensei, Duncan Wong. He is the one who taught me by example; he never told me anything as superficial knowledge, he was always waiting until I am ready enough to discover it myself, and checking on me all the time, of course! This way of teaching creates the difference between knowledge and inner wisdom. It takes more time to discover things yourself but when this is possible, an amazing deep understanding of the underlying mechanisms occurs, which means someone can apply to situations and teach them to others with confidence. And lastly, my friends Sophi Danis, Yota Tsotra and Onik Ketsogian ; they showed me how to be human and that the universe actually aligns itself for us to support everything we wish to happen around us.

Handling grievance

This I would go the Jewish way; I will give the employee many opportunities to do the job properly, providing guidance and support along the way. However, if for any reasons the person refuses to cooperate or change behaviour then someone has to take appropriate measures. It is not a good idea to let an employee go especially these days so I will do anything to avoid this.

Important decision

I think there are some risky decisions I made, the first one was made by my dad. I finished the university very early at the age of 19, so my dad said ‘now you have to go to work’. And I started working in professional environments very early seeing other people in my age having fun going to clubs, enjoying life etc. However, in the end, this meant that I could do a lot more things from such a relatively young age and have the experience I have now. Another decision was to move to the UK to work and do my postgraduate studies. You are Indian, you know that the British education system is one of the best in the world. It took everything I used to do in completely different level. And the last major turn was my decision to come back to Greece and help with the crisis despite the great job opportunities in the UK. The problem was that I knew and I still know what I am doing and the reasons why. My current job, at least in my opinion, is changing people’s ways of understanding, defining and changing their world.

My view on India technology development

I also teach creativity and innovation management to under and post graduate students in France and also Greece. Students in Greece just started to create spin-offs and start-ups in the middle of the crisis. I think the reason is that we are still in the 20th century industrial box. We also tend to stick with an idea that doesn’t work or sell. There are methods, for example the Blue Ocean Strategy tools that leads someone to check and actually value of the idea. If we make a mistake, we take the lesson and start again, and again. We have to think outside of this box and listen carefully to the new ear that is coming. It is not possible to put a piece of new cloth in a very old and ripped dress. So, in my opinion, it would be more about social innovation and micro-finance than really big innovative projects. Also to say it differently, there are no dreamers in new industries any more, as with the 50s and the computing visionaries.
Most importantly, we need to redefine everything around us, think about humanity’s and also environmental sustainability. So far the humanity plays the financial game of ‘predator-producer’ and it is the actual cause of the crisis, including the crisis in the human values. The new era requires new models as the previous one obviously didn’t work!
A good advice may be that the more the problems, the more the insights about situation and the way they function, which means more solutions. I know there is no money flow at the moment in the world, however, this will change and it will be a great challenge for the Indians to take over the market if they act intelligently.

Family background

I come from a small village called Pelopio, 3 kilometres away from Ancient Olympia, the place where the Olympic Games were born. My parents are farmers, I am extremely lucky to still have them in good health. I also have a sister who is an English language teacher, is married and lives close to my parents. I grew up among ancient columns and statues; I used to think: ‘Oh, this is what a God looks like!’.