Project Management Performance Through Engagement and Respect

Leaders and business owners often face critical project and team management issues when faced with challenges that leverage the future of the business.

For the most significant leveraged projects such as construction, expansion, acquisitions or mergers, a business must secure the services of independent professionals and firms due to the required expertise and licenses. A world-class architect, engineer, lawyer or accountant in a specialized field is both a valuable and costly asset. They have the potential to contribute great value or (if misdirected) squander a lot of cash on behalf of the owner. But the individual capabilities offered by specialized team members are only one part of the picture; to get real business value, the business needs to create a powerful and well-functioning team from both the internal staff and specialized external service providers.

Patrick O'Shei writes about managing a team of independent professionals to produce an optimal timely and valuable business outcome on a recent project. Creating this type of result is an incredibly difficult business challenge due to the complexity, competing interests, the high-stakes project demands, and the workloads of the professional team members involved.

Building Engagement and Respect across the team are keys to this effort. A successful leader and project effort ENGAGES team members on two levels - both formally, and informally - in the following ways, so that each team member:

1. Makes specific emotional commitments to the desired end-result as defined by the owner-organization.
2. Works willingly within the constructs of a proper professional engagement as defined in a work agreement or contract.

To achieve good outcomes, the team needs to offer RESPECT to each other (and experience it, across and among its members) - on three levels:

1. Each person treats others with respect on a human level with time for listening and addressing concerns.
2. Each person treats others with respect on a professional level with weighing of opinion, and appropriate deference, based upon their areas of expertise.
3. The business and the team treats each team-member (whether person or firm) with contractual respect. This means that all seek to make and understand decisions in the context of the contractual obligations, licenses and liabilities of each participating professional or firm.

These qualities set the ground-work for high performing teams in the complex and time-sensitive circumstances of strategic project management.

Case: A non-profit teaching institution faced erosion of margins and threat of survival. Read how the senior business manager formed and managed a professional team to implement a dramatic solution that is leading the business out of the crisis...

Read more on services we offer supporting businesses, owners and leaders to shape powerful teams when considering game-changing, high-stakes projects.

Transformational Leadership: Problems, Solutions, & Structure

Patrick O'Shei, in "Uncommon Wisdom", writes about the link between "problems" and "solutions".  Capable leaders have the awareness to recognize what the "frame" around these two orientations is, within which they and their organizations might operate:  When confronted with a challenge, do you see problems? or do you see solutions & possibilities?

A solution orientation is always broader and longer in scope, results-oriented and anticipates future implications.  Seeds of both new opportunities and future problems get planted along with new solutions.  A solution orientation is akin to playing chess where past play and the current board both provide data and guide the player; she subsequently can evaluate each potential move in terms of the potential impact on the future.

As an analogy:  A sinking ship is a problem--but what is the best solution? The solution orientation discerns between:

• Immediate problems and urgent failure (a penetration to the hull of the ship, leaking seams or joints in the hull of the boat, a terrible storm),
• Constraints on current performance (poor ship design, misuse or neglect of the ship) and
• Faulty application/ approach (using the wrong ship for the task, using a ship instead of a bridge).

While urgent problems may require pumping quickly and getting the sinking boat back to harbor, most long term leverage comes from understanding what outcome you seek and the possible solutions for creating that outcome.

Organizations and people who see first and predominantly "the problems" they face, may both effectively handle current problems--and entrap themselves in a world where they accomplish less, spend too much (over and over again), and ultimately fail. This occurs because they can only see solution of their problems in terms of eliminating the problem itself.

In his book, The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz declares that "structure determines performance". When we implement solutions, they create structure. "Excellent" solutions--generated from a robust consideration of possibilities, alternatives, questioning of desired outcomes, and reflecting on underlying purposes--produce desired results for longer periods of time without creating significant new problems. Excellent solutions leverage strengths across "what works" in the world.

As a leader, visualizing the desired outcome, in full, rich, clear detail--is an important part of generating solutions, as the gulf between current problems (reality) and the desired outcome may only be bridged in the mind initially. Some excellent solutions require a number of steps. Each step addresses current reality with an implementable solution--and each fully anticipates a future solution, naturally producing both interim results and providing leverage for achieving the future solution. This path of leveraged solutions is akin to building bridges, where organizations take intermediate steps in coordinated fashion, to bring into being one overall solution that really works.

excerpted from "Uncommon Wisdom/ A Solution Orientation:  What Floats Your Boat", Patrick O'Shei, 2/2010.