Making a Modern Project Manager
SERIES ARTICLE
By Yasmina Khelifi
Paris, France
What is complacency?
a calm sense of well-being and security: the quality or state of being satisfied especially: satisfaction or self-satisfaction accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies
– Merriam-Webster dictionary
Why can complacency become a problem?
Complacency is a comfortable state that every leader may wish to achieve. But it presents some risks. It can prevent you from learning new things or meeting new people. It can prevent you from experimenting with new ways of working.
How to resist it
Complacency is not something you passively avoid. You must actively build resistance to it.
Engage in diverse communities
When I talk about diverse communities, I include those outside your field of expertise. I make sure to engage with people working in areas that are completely different from my own. For example, I was part of a coaching community. I’m now part of an international marketing community. I read the threads, listen to advice, and observe how people interact.
Volunteer
Volunteering is a great way to resist complacency. I found that it really gave me the space to try out new things and indeed forced me to do so. My experiences of volunteering are described more fully in my coauthored book with Mayte Mata Sivera, The Volunteering Journey to Project Leadership.
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Editor’s note: This series of articles is by a project manager for Gen X, Y and Z project professionals. The author Yasmina Khelifi is a project manager with a large multinational telecom in France while also an active PM professional, authoring articles, interviews and a popular LinkedIn blog as well as a podcast with a global audience. Also active in PMI France for many years, she has been an international correspondent for the PMWJ since 2021. We are delighted that she has agreed to author a series of articles based on her personal experiences over the last decade.
How to cite this article: Khelifi, Y. (2026). Resist Complacency; Making a Modern Project Manager, series article, PM World Journal, Vol. XV, Issue VII, July. Available online at: https://pmworldjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/pmwj166-Jul2026-Khelifi-Resist-Complacency-series-article.pdf
About the Author
Yasmina Khelifi
Paris, France
Yasmina Khelifi, PMP, PMI- ACP, PMI-PBA is an experienced project manager in the telecom industry. Along with her 20-year career at Orange S.A. (the large French multinational telecommunications corporation), she sharpened her global leadership skills, delivering projects with major manufacturers and SIM makers. Yasmina strives for building collaborative bridges between people to make international projects successful. She relies on three pillars: project management skills, the languages she speaks, and a passion for sharing knowledge.
She is a PMP certification holder since 2013, a PMI- ACP and PMI-PBA certification holder since 2020. She is an active volunteer member at PMI France and PMI UAE, and a member of PMI Germany Chapter. French-native, she can speak German, English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and she is learning Arabic. Yasmina loves sharing her knowledge and experiences at work, in her volunteers’ activities at PMI, and in projectmanagement.com as a regular blogger. She is also the host and co-founder of the podcast Global Leaders Talk with Yasmina Khelifi to help people in becoming better international leaders.
Yasmina can be contacted at https://yasminakhelifi.com/ or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasminakhelifi-pmp-telecom/
Visit her correspondent profile at https://pmworldlibrary.net/yasmina-khelifi/
To view other works by Yasmina Kehelifi, visit her author showcase in the PM World Library at https://pmworldlibrary.net/authors/yasmina-khelifi/
