by Dave Wakeman, PMP
I’ve written a lot lately about leadership in project management and one area that I think needs special emphasis is how we can create a culture of contribution in our project teams. This culture of contribution is important because our projects don’t happen in vacuums and as project managers, we depend on the contribution of our teams to see our projects to successful conclusions. Here are 3 ways you can help build a strong culture of contribution in your teams.
- Get To Know Your Team: Being a leader is more than just giving orders to your team and waiting for them to carry out your directives while sending emails to your sponsor and key stakeholders. To create a culture of contribution, you are going to need to spend a lot of time talking with and understanding your team members and their goals and desires. By getting to know your team and understand their goals and desires, you can partner with your team members to find ways that they can work on tasks in the project that will help accelerate their progress towards their goals. This will in turn help your culture because if the project manager is putting the team member in a position to advance his or her career goals, the team member is going to be much more likely to act in a proactive manner to things that need to be done to move the project along. This can be done pretty simply enough. As an example, you have a person that you have been working with on several projects and know has a goal to move into the PMO and handle scheduling, you can allow this team member to work with you to set schedules, timelines, and other aspects of your resource allocation plan that fall within that person’s area of focus.
- Collaborate In Decision Making: As project managers we are at the mercy of the information we have access to. Sometimes this means we don’t have the information necessary to make great decisions or we have team members that aren’t comfortable always proactively offering up status updates or information. So it pays to have your team members help you make decisions. By collaborating on decisions, you are allowing your team members a positive venue to contribute and to share information that they either didn’t know was important or might not share with you in a timely manner. This kind of collaboration can be achieved by having daily check-ins about schedules, timelines, or milestones. Or, you can easily have a weekly meeting where you work with your team to set the next week’s schedule. The options are limitless, but the core of this is to empower your team to use their specific knowledge to contribute to the effort of helping you make better decisions.
- Demand Accountability: Knowing your team, helping them achieve their goals, letting them collaborate in decision making, and all of the other ideas we can come up with to create a culture of contribution are going to be meaningless without some form of accountability. Accountability is important because you want to make sure that you aren’t just opening yourself up to team members making demands and imposing ideas on you, you also want to ensure that when these ideas and concepts are presented that there is someone that champions the idea or action within the project team. More importantly, you want someone to be responsible for the implementation and execution of the idea because, again, as the project manager you are only as successful as your team members help you to be. Just so you aren’t scared off by the idea of introducing accountability to your teams, you can build it into your plans pretty simply by assigning tasks and deadlines based upon your team members feedback and input and following up on the agreed actions and deadlines. It doesn’t have to be scary, but you do have to be consistent.
There are many more ways to build a strong culture of contribution in your project teams. I know I am missing some good ideas, so let me know what you do in the comments section below.
Dave Wakeman is an expert in organizational development working with clients on their development issues in areas such as change management, strategy, leadership and communication. Dave is a featured writer for the Project Management Institute and appears monthly on their Voices blog.
He has also been quoted extensively on organizational development, project management, and leadership in publications as varied as Minyaville.com, Dell’s TechOne Magazine, Loans.org, and SmartCEO. He has worked with companies all over the world including American Express, the US Department of Commerce & Bureau of the Census, the City of New York, Google, Microsoft, and Madison Square Garden.