12 Principle #9: A high-performing team and culture are indicators of the health and resilience of a project

Team, project, organization

Principle #9 encourages you to invest time to develop techniques for measuring and sustaining your team’s motivation, capability and performance.

The shifting focus of success

Today, project managers need to be project leaders too, especially for the more complex and cross-functional projects. These require pulling together resources from across the organization and changing the old status quo. In fact, we can argue that the best project managers are not only leaders but also entrepreneurs – they are the CEOs of their projects.

Marshall Goldsmith, the world’s number-one executive coach, told me, ‘Executives tend to see project managers as technical experts: very tactical people, focused on the detailed challenges of the project. Modern leadership is moving into facilitation. The best CEOs I have coached are great facilitators. Therefore, the project managers of the future will have to become project leaders, strong in facilitation, rather than technical experts.’1

Over the past decades, we have seen the focus shifting from the original areas of project management, also known as hard skills (scope, planning, scheduling and estimation), to soft skills (leadership, stakeholder management and communication). A good project manager can navigate the organization, motivate the team, sell the project’s benefits to the key stakeholders, and deliver on scope, on time and within budget. Other skills required by successful project managers are:

• understanding the strategic and business aspects of the project
• influencing and persuading stakeholders at all levels
• leading in a matrix organization
• creating a high-performing team from a group of individuals
• providing feedback and motivating the project team, and
• monitoring the progress of the project work.

Understanding the individual and the team

During the development of a huge and technologically advanced new commuter train station at London Bridge, in the heart of the UK’s capital, Costain, one of the main contractors, understood that everyone involved on the project needed to be listened to as an individual in order to see themselves as part of a team.

The concrete piling contractors were not initially familiar with the greater safety demands of such a complex site. Initial attempts to improve safety by ‘calling out’ poor safety practice or using disciplinary procedures proved counter-productive, encouraging the staff involved to become defensive and resentful. Instead, the project team started to take time to understand how and why the contractors were working in the ways they were, and then took time to demonstrate why and how the demands of the London Bridge site were different.

Projects are often seen as a development opportunity for high-potential managers. They take the lead of a large strategic project for two years to get exposure with top management. At the same time, they build complementary skills not required in a line function. The problem is that they don’t see projects as a long-term career, and thus they are not interested in learning about project management in more depth. So they struggle, as they are not aware of the tools and techniques that will make the project a success.

The integrated project team

Construction projects are traditionally organized around a client who contracts the building work to a main contractor who, in turn, subcontracts elements of the project to a long supply chain of smaller companies.

These projects struggle to innovate and often find themselves mired in painful litigation between different contractors and the client over unfulfilled responsibilities.

The response of the industry in the face of the growing size and complexity of projects has been to endeavour to re-engineer their contracting process and to create integrated project teams.

Some owners are successfully applying a fresh alternative approach to the way they are contracting and incentivizing their project teams to collaborate. They are using a form of contract that involves more than two parties to the agreement: a ‘multi-party contract’ that allows multiple parties to all agree to a common set of terms and expectations. At a minimum, the owner, its architect and its contractor all sign the single agreement, and in some cases, other members of the project team that are deemed to be critical to the project success are also brought into the multi-party agreement. Besides the parties all signing a single agreement, what is also unique is how risks are shared and how compensation is tied not to an individual party’s performance, but rather the team’s performance on the overall project. Integration of project teams is proving to yield better results.2

Another aspect to consider is project staffing. Projects need people to carry them out. Ensuring that the organization has available resources, with the right skills, expertise and experience to implement the project, is an essential responsibility of senior management. Yet it is surprising to see how many organizations launch projects without doing a capacity check prior to confirming the initiative.

The best and most experienced staff (for example, developers) may be booked on other tasks and projects. If their contribution is not suitably planned, the project is going to suffer. Lack of availability of required resources leads to delays and frequently to project failure.

Besides availability, a key aspect of project success is team commitment. As mentioned earlier, people tend to have other responsibilities besides their contribution to the project. Commitment to the project is never a given, especially because employees are often asked to join in such a way that it is difficult for them to refuse (we’ve all received an email that asks us to ‘kindly’ agree to something but where in reality we don’t have much choice). They are ready to contribute, often for free and/or giving up some of their private time, only because they want to be part of an amazing experience.

Project managers may be asked to complete extensive and often time-consuming reports to inform senior management about the progress of a project. Yet a quick and easy way to assess the health of a project is by asking the project manager two questions.

1 How much time do you dedicate to this project?

2 How committed are you to the project?

Ideally, the answer to both should be 100 per cent, which increases the chances of success. However, often project managers are not fully dedicated to one single project. Depending on the project, 50 per cent is still acceptable, but anything below that will increase the risk of failure due to potentially feeble oversight and weak management.

The importance of interaction

Kelvin McGrath, founder of an Australian organization called Meeting Quality, understood intuitively that the health of a project could be tracked by understanding the quality of the social interactions – most obviously the project meetings – and how it fluctuates at different times during the project.

Using classic social network analysis tools to map the number of interactions within an organization (and who was interacting with whom) allowed him to build a picture of the culture of the organizations with which he was working.

Later he realized that actually the quality of these interactions was much more important than the quantity alone. He created an algorithm called the Meeting Promoter Score (MPS), which allowed the quality of interactions to be measured between individuals and more importantly groups of individuals. Individual MPS scores could then be aggregated for the organization and beyond.3

Lessons from Apple’s approach to team selection

‘We’re starting a new project,’ he told them. ‘It’s so secret, I can’t even tell you what the new project is. I cannot tell you who you will work for. What I can tell you is that if you choose to accept this role, you’re going to work harder than you ever have in your entire life. You’re going to have to give up nights and weekends probably for a couple of years as we make this product.’4

So Scott Forstall, head of the iPhone software division, might have approached his potential project team members. The project team comprised one of the most talented groups of individuals in recent history. The best engineers, the best programmers and the best designers were selected to join the team. And not part time – one day, or half a day a week – which is most companies’ standard approach with their strategic projects. The chosen people were fully discharged from all their duties and were assigned full time to the project, effective immediately. Project Purple became their life.

Forstall later explained that Steve Jobs had told him he could have anyone in the company on his team. And the high quality of the team didn’t stop with the technicians. Jobs decided to include the best leadership team too, starting with Jonny Ive, the designer of the iPod and MacBook, who was put in charge of the look of the handset.5

How to put Principle #9 into practice

At the beginning of a project, senior management need to assess and confirm the capacity to work on the project. They need to ensure the resources and the skills required to develop the solution are there. It is necessary to anticipate potential bottlenecks by freeing up resources or engaging external capacity and expertise.

Establish a standard process to appoint the best-prepared project manager to lead the project. They should have technical knowledge of project management, the required leadership competencies and business understanding. The organization should recognize project management as a task for professional project managers; develop a project management competency framework and an official career path to help project managers grow in the role.

Principle #9 highlights the importance of team culture as an indicator of the health and resilience of a project. Here are some tools you can use, to get you started.

Select an engaged and dedicated team

This should include the project leader and sponsor. Ask the project leader two questions to help assess whether the project is in good hands.

• How much of your time do you dedicate to this project?
  Strategic projects require 100 per cent dedication. Anything below that can lead to distraction and to a reduction in the pressure on the project. Often project managers are asked to lead several projects simultaneously. In my experience, it is hard to lead more than three important projects at the same time, and it is also hard, not to say impossible, to manage an important project while having a full-time position in the day-to-day activities of the organization.
• How committed are you to the success of the project?
  Knowing that the project will face challenges, if the project manager and resources are not committed, the project will most likely be a total failure. A great example of the positive thinking required is Alan Mulally, the project manager in charge of building the Boeing 777, a massive undertaking, in the worst circumstances, after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and with Boeing struggling to survive. Yet his strong commitment and full-time dedication drove a project of 10,000 team members to create one of the most advanced aircraft in the world.

Lack of conviction in a project leader can quickly spread to the rest of the team. When the conviction and morale drop significantly, the sponsor should intervene and find ways to restore confidence, either by taking corrective actions or, eventually, by replacing the project manager.

Proactively foster a high-performing team

High-performing teams work together to convey exceptional project outcomes, over and over again. High-performing teams don’t happen just by coincidence or chance. Research around team dynamics has identified several common characteristics. The performance of the group is based on:

• instituting shared trust and respect
• a comprehension of the individuals, their different backgrounds and practices, and
• an alignment on a common purpose.

One of the main reasons why project teams are not highly productive, therefore impacting the performance of the project, is because the project leader doesn’t build this foundation in the early stages of the project.

The best project leaders set aside time at the beginning of the project for the team to:

• become acquainted with one another
• participate in the setting of the goals of the project
• hold each other accountable for meeting these goals
• build trust across the team, and
• establish a set of ground rules that will define the required behaviours for the team.

An important aspect to consider when forming the team is that the most engaged members of a project are, in most cases, those who voluntarily join the project.

The four stages that a team need to go through to reach the high-performing stage are:

• stage 1 – forming
• stage 2 – storming
• stage 3 – norming
• stage 4 – performing.

Here is a checklist you can apply for high-performing teams.

• Introduction
  The team have the time to meet and get to know each other.
• Goal setting
  All team members participate in establishing the project and team goals.
• Ground rules
  The team have defined expectations about team behaviour and values, which have been written down and shared.
• Team identity
  The team can describe their primary purpose and expected goals. The team win and lose, not individuals.
• Contribution
  The members have responsibilities in their area of expertise, and are aware of how they can actively contribute to achieving the goals of the project.
• Problem solving and risk taking
  The team have a problem-solving culture and are encouraged to take risks. Individuals are not blamed or punished.
• Joint decision making
  The team are capable of making decisions that are backed by all the members in a timely manner.
• Conflict handling
  Team members feel free to voice conflicting points of view, including when they disagree with the project leader. Conflicts are resolved in a timely and direct fashion, with no damage to relationships and with the best possible outcome.
• Feedback
  Both the team and individuals receive feedback regularly; there is a continuous improvement mindset.
• Leadership
  The project leader and sponsor are the first ones applying the high-performing rules.