2.2 TEAM PERFORMANCE DOMAIN
This performance domain entails establishing the culture and environment that enables a collection of diverse individuals to evolve into a high-performing project team. This includes recognizing the activities needed to foster project team development and encouraging leadership behaviors from all project team members.
The following definitions are relevant to the Team Performance Domain:
Project Manager. The person assigned by the performing organization to lead the project team that is responsible for achieving the project objectives.
Project Management Team. The members of the project team who are directly involved in project management activities.
Project Team. A set of individuals performing the work of the project to achieve its objectives.
2.2.1 PROJECT TEAM MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP
Project management entails applying knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques for management activities as well as leadership activities. Management activities focus on the means of meeting project objectives, such as having effective processes, planning, coordinating, measuring, and monitoring work, among others. Leadership activities focus on people. Leadership includes influencing, motivating, listening, enabling, and other activities having to do with the project team. Both are important in delivering the intended outcomes.
2.2.1.1 Centralized Management and Leadership
While leadership activities should be practiced by all project team members, management activities may be centralized or distributed. In an environment where management activities are centralized, accountability (being answerable for an outcome), is usually assigned to one individual, such as the project manager or similar role. In these situations, a project charter or other authorizing document can provide approval for the project manager to form a project team to achieve the project outcomes.
2.2.1.2 Distributed Management and Leadership
Sometimes project management activities are shared among a project management team, and project team members are responsible for completing the work. There are also situations where a project team may self-organize to complete a project. Rather than having a designated project manager, someone within the project team may serve as facilitator to enable communication, collaboration, and engagement. This role may shift among project team members.
Servant leadership is a style of leadership that focuses on understanding and addressing the needs and development of project team members in order to enable the highest possible project team performance. Servant leaders place emphasis on developing project team members to their highest potential by focusing on addressing questions, such as:
▶ Are project team members growing as individuals?
▶ Are project team members becoming healthier, wiser, freer, and more autonomous?
▶ Are project team members more likely to become servant leaders?
Servant leaders allow project teams to self-organize when possible and increase levels of autonomy by passing appropriate decision-making opportunities to project team members. Servant leadership behaviors include:
▶ Obstacle removal. Since it is the project team who generates the majority of business value, a critical role for the servant leader is to maximize delivery by removing impediments to their progress. This includes solving problems and removing obstacles that may be hampering the project team’s work. By solving or easing these impediments, the project team can deliver value to the business faster.
▶ Diversion shield. Servant leaders protect the project team from internal and external diversions that redirect the project team from the current objectives. Time fragmentation reduces productivity, so shielding the project team from noncritical, external demands helps the project team stay focused.
▶ Encouragement and development opportunities. The servant leader also provides tools and encouragement to keep the project team satisfied and productive. Learning what motivates project team members as individuals and finding ways to reward them for good work helps keep project team members satisfied.
2.2.1.3 Common Aspects of Team Development
Regardless of how the management activities are structured, there are common aspects of project team development that are relevant for most project teams. These include:
▶ Vision and objectives. It is essential that everyone is aware of the project vision and objectives. The vision and objectives are communicated throughout the project. This includes referencing the intended outcomes when the project team is engaged in making decisions and solving problems.
▶ Roles and responsibilities. It is important to make sure project team members understand and fulfill their roles and responsibilities. This can include identifying gaps in knowledge and skills as well as strategies to address those gaps through training, mentoring, or coaching.
▶ Project team operations. Facilitating project team communication, problem solving, and the process of coming to consensus may include working with the project team to develop a project team charter and a set of operating guidelines or project team norms.
▶ Guidance. Guidance can be directed to the overall project team to keep everyone headed in the right direction. Individual project team members may also provide guidance on a particular task or deliverable.
▶ Growth. Identifying areas where the project team is performing well and pointing out areas where the project team can improve helps the project team to grow. Working collaboratively, the project team can identify goals for its improvement and take steps to meet those goals. This also applies to each individual on the project team. Individuals may want to grow their skills and experience in certain areas, and the project manager can assist with that.
There are several models that describe the stages of project team growth included in Section 4.
When project teams form across different organizations based on a contract, strategic partnership, or other business relationship, specific roles that perform various functions may be more formalized and less flexible depending on the contract or other terms. Such arrangements often require more up-front work to establish a “one team” mindset, ensure project team members understand how everyone contributes to the project, and establish other enablers that integrate skills, capabilities, and processes.
2.2.2 PROJECT TEAM CULTURE
Each project team develops its own team culture. The project team’s culture may be established deliberately by developing project team norms, or informally through the behaviors and actions of its project team members. The project team culture operates within the organization’s culture but reflects the project team’s individual ways of working and interacting.
Human beings have a set of biases, some of them unconscious and some of them conscious. For example, one person may feel that unless a schedule is displayed using a software-generated Gantt chart, that it is not a true or valid schedule. Another person may have a contrasting bias that detailed planning any further out than 30 days is a waste of time. Being open and transparent about biases up front establishes a culture of openness and trust that can enable consensus and collaboration.
The project manager is key in establishing and maintaining a safe, respectful, nonjudgmental environment that allows the project team to communicate openly. One way to accomplish this is by modeling desired behaviors, such as:
▶ Transparency. Being transparent in how one thinks, makes choices, and processes information helps others identify and share their own processes. This can extend to being transparent about biases as well.
▶ Integrity. Integrity is comprised of ethical behavior and honesty. Individuals demonstrate honesty by surfacing risks, communicating their assumptions and basis of estimates, delivering bad news early, ensuring status reports provide an accurate depiction of the project’s status, and in many other ways. Ethical behavior can include surfacing potential defects or negative effects in product design, disclosing potential conflicts of interest, ensuring fairness, and making decisions based on environmental, stakeholder, and financial impacts.
▶ Respect. Demonstrating respect for each person, how the person thinks, the person’s skills, and the perspective and expertise the person brings to the project team sets the stage for all project team members to adopt this behavior.
▶ Positive discourse. Throughout the project, diverse opinions, different ways of approaching situations, and misunderstandings will occur. These are a normal part of conducting projects. They present an opportunity to have a dialogue rather than a debate. A dialogue entails working with others to resolve divergent opinions. The goal is to arrive at a resolution that all parties can embrace. A debate, on the other hand, is a win-lose scenario where people are more interested in winning personally than they are in being open to alternative solutions to a problem.
▶ Support. Projects can be challenging from the perspectives of technical challenges, environmental influences, and interpersonal interactions. Supporting project team members through problem solving and removing impediments builds a supportive culture and leads to a trusting and collaborative environment. Support can also be demonstrated by providing encouragement, showing empathy, and engaging in active listening.
▶ Courage. Recommending a new approach to a problem or a way of working can be intimidating. Likewise, it can be challenging to disagree with a subject matter expert or someone with greater authority. However, demonstrating the courage that it takes to make a suggestion, disagree, or try something new enables a culture of experimentation and communicates to others that it is safe to be courageous and try new approaches.
▶ Celebrating success. Focusing on project goals, challenges, and issues often sidelines the fact that individual project team members and the project team as a whole are steadily progressing toward those goals. Because work takes priority, project team members may defer recognizing demonstrations of innovation, adaptation, service to others, and learning. However, recognizing such contributions in real time can keep the project team and individuals motivated.
2.2.3 HIGH-PERFORMING PROJECT TEAMS
One goal of effective leadership is to create a high-performing project team. There are a number of factors that contribute to high-performing project teams. The list below is not comprehensive, but it identifies some of the factors associated with high-performing project teams.
▶ Open communication. An environment that fosters open and safe communication allows for productive meetings, problem solving, brainstorming, and so forth. It is also the cornerstone for other factors, such as shared understanding, trust, and collaboration.
▶ Shared understanding. The purpose for the project and the benefits it will provide are held in common.
▶ Shared ownership. The more ownership of the outcomes that project team members feel, the better they are likely to perform.
▶ Trust. A project team in which its members trust each other is willing to go the extra distance to deliver success. People are less likely to do the extra work it may take to succeed if they do not trust their project team members, project manager, or the organization.
▶ Collaboration. Project teams that collaborate and work with each other rather than work in silos or compete tend to generate more diverse ideas and end up with better outcomes.
▶ Adaptability. Project teams that are able to adapt the way they work to the environment and the situation are more effective.
▶ Resilience. When issues or failures occur, high-performing project teams recover quickly.
▶ Empowerment. Project team members who feel empowered to make decisions about the way they work perform better than those who are micromanaged.
▶ Recognition. Project teams who are recognized for the work they put in and the performance they achieve are more likely to continue to perform well. Even the simple act of showing appreciation reinforces positive team behavior.
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