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.

What Conditions Make for Top-Performing Senior Teams?

In a wide array of recent engagements with companies and projects, covering an array of senior executive teams led by CXO's, we observe that SOME perform with real synergy - where the teams are able to create dramatic, innovative value beyond the individual contributions of their members - while energetically engaged with each other, connected in important emotional and psychological ways.

OTHERS...  cannot create business outcomes, are slowed by friction, full of unhappiness, rife with defection and "retirement-in-place".

What leads to these dramatically different outcomes?  Observation suggests that results do not FOLLOW "good feelings" on the team, but precede or run in parallel with good feelings.  Further, the role the senior leader plays in the group, and how s/he plays that role, has some impact - that the "leadership stance" the senior leader is able to create, can dramatically organize and motivate positive team process and outcomes  or work against good outcomes.  The stances of individual team members - leaders in their own right - shape the dynamics of the team.  Finally, observation suggests that the personal connection of each member to the team's shared commitment (its mission, or purpose, or objective) is fundamental to the ways the team operates.

In your observations of senior teams - in your organization - what have you observed about how top performing senior teams work - and what contributes to their success or failure?  What stories about "best" team experiences can you share?

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