Hello fellow colleagues, how’s it going? Hope you had a fantastic week! Hope you liked our previous post about how to hire right resources. If you haven’t checked it out, please do and leave your feedback in the comments section (post available here).
Today’s post is all about team success. When it comes to planning and executing projects, it is important for the team to be aligned towards common goals in making sure the project stays on track and is executed with limited disruptions. From this perspective, here are a few tips to help you to make sure the team stays successful throughout a project:
Share Project Vision
It is important for the project team to understand the project leadership/sponsor’s vision of the end goal. As a project manager, it is important to share the purpose of the project, the anticipated benefits achieved by executing this project and how this aligns to the organization’s long-term vision. Without a vision, the project team members may have difficulty in understanding why they are working on this type of effort.
Have daily stand ups
Whether your project is agile, traditional waterfall, or a hybrid of the two, it might be useful to have a short (15-30 min) daily stand up as it will be essential in keeping the project and team on track. By checking on what the team is doing daily, the project manager and leadership team can provide the appropriate support to make sure the project stays on track. Additionally, daily stand ups provide individual and team level accountability to make sure everyone on the project team has a task/set of tasks they are working on.
Check in with teammates
While having daily team stand ups maintains team accountability and keeps the whole team informed of project progress, the project manager should also have check ins with the work stream leads and/or individual team members (depending on how small or large the project is). By checking in with direct workstream leads and/or individual project members, you can understand how they are doing in terms of their tasks for project delivery as well as let them share their perspectives of how the project is going and bring up any issues/concerns that they may be hesitant to bring up in the daily stand ups. Additionally, it is good for project managers to make sure the work that the individual team members are doing align with their personal goals. This cannot be emphasized enough; your team needs to be passionate about the tasks they are doing, even if it may be boring. Every person on the team is an individual contributor that provides an impact to the success of a project and it is important that each team member know their role in how they bring this.
Give credit
There will be difficult moments in projects where certain team members will be required to step up to deliver more than what is asked of them, or where they take “ownership” of the problem and take it to a resolution even if it was not required of them. These are the moments that matter for team success and it is critical to recognize efforts made by team members, especially when they go above and beyond to make sure that the tasks were completed on time and/or resolved the open issues that were pending for some time.
Show humility
As a project manager, there will be moments where you may not know everything or there may be moments where things could have been done differently/better. In times like this, it is always good to show a sense of humility to the team and be open about how things can improve or could have been approached differently. When you do this, it enables people on the team to understand that their leader is a human too and we should all focus on self and team growth. We cannot hide what we do wrong, that is a very traditional and old way of operating. In today’s environment, we should be able to understand that there are ways we can do things better and ask others on the team to provide their perspectives as well. After all, when you work as a team, you are a single unit and have to make sure your unit is doing the best it can do based on the circumstances in which you operate.
These are some of the ways to enable team success within projects. There are definitely more…what is your viewpoint? Please comment below and let us know your thoughts. We would love to hear from you. Stay tuned for more informational blogs, have an amazing long weekend. Cheers!