Team Building

In business, work is done by teams - either functional teams or project teams - or by individuals. Organizing and building effective teams is a core competency of business management; and where projects are concerned, it is a core competency of successful project management as well. In my opinion, project managers understand this critical successful factor much more clearly than most other business managers.

In this article, I want to look at high performing teams and the role of empowerment... Only a few times in my career have I been involved with truly empowered teams, and it is amazing what they can accomplish. High performance teams - teams that perform at very high levels - almost always have three critical characteristics (among others):

• The team is empowered to accomplish the goals of the project;
• The team is truly committed to accomplishing the goals of the project; and
• The team is the right team with the right skills for the project.

The problem in most cases, at least in my experience, is that the culture and values are not in place in the organization to support the reality of high performance teams. The organization may talk about empowerment, but does not make it so - usually because command and control structures or attitudes are still too embedded in the organization or the management team. Or the project manager or executives may ask for (or worse demand) commitment, but they do not enable team members to be fully committed to the business goals or the project at hand.

Currently, I am very happy to say, I am with a company (DaVita Inc.) that truly "gets" and enables empowerment, and therefore, teammates can truly get committed to a project if given what they need - which is clarity about the goals, lots of information and communication, and cohesiveness in direction. (DaVita has a unique culture that fosters teamwork, mission, values, and purpose, and it emphasizes those things by frequently teaching and reinforcing the DaVita way. As a result of this empowering culture, DaVita has gone from startup to Fortune 500 in less than nine years! I can only hope other organizations begin to see the wisdom in this approach and adopt it.)

Teams that are seen and treated as a loose collection of skills will never be high performance. Teams that are seen and treated as unique but equal individuals, who are capable of contributing outstanding work and who are brought together to create unity and synergy around the common goals of a project, are much more likely to achieve a high level of performance.

What can a project manager or business manager do to improve team performance?

• Seek to build the right team with not only the right skill sets but also the right chemistry and team spirit.
• Work with management to truly empower the team. Insist that the team not have to go up the ladder to get approval for everything. Every time the team has to go "up the ladder," it slows the team down and creates frustration within the team.
• Promote empowerment within the team - that means not being the bottleneck for every single decision. Lay out guidelines for issues and decisions that should be brought to the PM and those that shouldn't.
• Involve the team in the whole project process. Don't go off and develop "the project plan" without them, but instead fully involve them in the planning process. They will benefit greatly in the process and add lots of value. They will point out dependencies and issues that you would miss. They will suggest solutions or approaches that you would never think of. And then, ask them to commit as individuals and a team to the plan they came up with.

Now, the project manager must also be the coordinator and facilitator to keep the team and the project on track in the following ways:

• Focus, and help the team focus, on the most important things for that day and that week.
• Remind the team often of the project goals and provide clarity about the goals.
• Provide lots of information about the schedule, due dates, deliverables, dependencies, and other factors that, if missed, can negatively impact the project.
• Enable the team to communicate directly with the customers or business sponsors.
• Continuously promote teamwork and information sharing.
• Empower everyone on the team to resolve issues and roadblocks.
• Maintain the project organization, visibility to management, and consistency of direction.

The company culture may be a barrier, but by the very seeking to build a project team that is both empowered and committed, the probability of project success will go up enormously.