3.3.2T Develop Project Team

Strive to Create High-Performance Teams (3.3.2T.P1)

Have you ever been on a project team that had everything going right?  The team members all got along; they all had the right skills; everyone worked hard and pulled together to get the project done.

Those are just some of the characteristics of a high-performing team.  High-performing teams can sometimes form by themselves, perhaps even in spite of a manager that gets in the way.  However, it is more typical that a manager helps a team become high-performing and facilitates them through a process that leads to the team becoming as effective and efficient as possible. 

For some managers, this journey is extremely difficult if not impossible.  They may be very organized, technically strong, and masters of organizational politics, but they may not be very good people managers and not very effective at building a team.  In some respects, it is also hard for a manager to guide a team toward high-performance if he was never part of a high-performing team.  Reaching toward high-performance is almost a vision, and if you do not have a vision based on experience, it may be very difficult to guide a team of people there. 

You cannot start with a new team and expect them to be high performing in a day, a week or a month.  There are many aspects of building a high-performance team that require a long period of time to bring to fruition.  You will find that teams that have not worked together before usually go through four stages of team development, as defined in the Tuckman model.  They are:

  • Forming.  The team is first meeting and getting to know each other.  They can’t rely on others totally because they are not sure what everyone’s skills, strengths and weaknesses are. 

  • Storming.  The team struggles through understanding roles and responsibilities.  Usually personality conflicts start to arise.  Team members feel good enough to complain, but not always confident or knowledgeable enough to propose solutions.  Team members know each other well enough that they can start to argue.  Generally, the team is in flux and people are not exactly sure what they are supposed to be doing.  Some immature teams never make it past this stage.

  • Norming.  The team starts getting used to each other’s strengths and weaknesses.  Team members start to compensate for one another and a feeling of camaraderie starts to take shape.  Team members accept each other as people and enjoy being around each other.  The team may begin realizing that as a whole, they are stronger than they were as just a group of individual contributors. 

  • Performing.  This is the last stage of a high-performance team.  At this stage the team strives toward common objectives – written or unwritten.  They rely on each other.  When trouble arises, they ask how they can help.  The team members can generally work without a lot of management supervision.  The overall productivity is especially high and is recognized as such by others outside the team. 

Team members of a high-performing team have trust and confidence in the other members of the team.  They cannot build this level of trust overnight, which is another reason why these teams take some time to form.  These types of teams are rare, which is a major reason why people who have been on one remember the feeling even years later. 

However, as mentioned earlier, they are not easily formed.  Given a vision of the end result, a manager can try to put the pieces in place that will help a team get through the four-stage model described earlier.  Sometimes teams can get stuck between stages.  They may, in fact, be stuck permanently.  Fortunately, there are some things that can be done to facilitate the team’s growth. 

  • Set common objectives.  Teams will have a hard time performing at a high level unless they are all striving toward a common set of objectives.  Even if members of your team do different jobs, a set of objectives can usually be written that will encompass all of them.  If possible, the team should also be rewarded based on achieving this common set of objectives.  This will assist in getting everyone pulling in the same direction. 

  • Establish good internal work processes.  It is true that you cannot build consistently good products, or deliver good services, with poor work processes.  The high-performing team has a set of internal processes that guide how members act and react in particular circumstances.  For instance, if problems arise, they know how to invoke problem-solving techniques.  If a client makes a request for a change to specifications, they know to invoke scope change procedures.  In this way, they maintain as little uncertainty as possible.  Another aspect of these teams is that they constantly look for ways to improve their current processes.  If a process was perfect a year ago, it may not be perfect today.  The team constantly challenges the current state and recommends changes for improvement.

  • Instill good work ethic.  This probably goes without saying.  High-performing teams rarely form in an environment where people complain about their workload or where team members complain about the work habits of other team members.  High-performing teams find the challenges associated with their work and work hard to complete their assignments within expectations.  Sometimes hard work gets confused with working a lot of hours.  These are not the same things.  A high-performance team works efficiently and works smart.  Members get more work done in a typical day than their counterparts (in fact, a team that must pull late hours all the time probably has some problems with focus that might need to be addressed to get them out of that rut).  On the other hand, the high-performing team understands when members need to pull together to achieve the project objectives, and sometimes that does require working many extra hours.

  • Keep everyone focused.  The high-performance team is focused on the objectives and the deliverables, and understands how to achieve them.  They don’t get sidetracked by rumors or politics.  They don’t get absorbed in gossip.  They don’t spend more time complaining than working.  They know what is expected of them and do the best they can to meet those expectations. 

  • Maintain a high level of motivation.  The high-performance team identifies the challenges associated with meeting its objectives and completing its deliverables.  This is both a self-motivation on the part of each team member as well as a reinforced motivation through the entire team.

  • Keep organized.  Team members understand what their role on the team is and what everyone else's role is as well.  People understand the work they have on their plate today, as well as what the remainder of their work is.  They understand the processes and procedures needed to run the team, including scope change management, risk management, issues management, quality management, and status reporting.  If unusual events occur, they know how to manage the process and how to escalate when appropriate.

  • Strive toward a balanced set of key skills.  A high-performance team has all of the skills needed to complete the work on its plate.  Team members have the skills needed from a technical standpoint, as well as the right set of role-based skills.  For instance, it is hard to be a high-performance team when everyone wants to be the Team Leader.  If some of these “leaders” are asked to build deliverables instead, they may not have the right skills or the right motivation for the team to be successful.  If short-term skill sets are missing, then the appropriate skills are brought in from outside resources if needed.  If the skill will be needed on the team in the long-term, team members receive the training necessary to perform the work in the future.  In a high-performing team, people understand their strengths and weaknesses, but they also are willing to work outside their comfort area when needed.  

  • Foster mutual respect.  Members of high-performance teams typically get along with each other.  They have mutual respect for each other and trust that the others are working as hard as they are.  They assist other team members when they are in need and understand that team members will do the same for them if needed.  In general, team members are even-tempered and not prone to high ecstasy or depression.  The team members respect each other’s abilities as well as help compensate for any weaknesses, since they know others are compensating for their weaknesses as well.

In the right circumstances, a manager can take the lead to move a team toward high-performance status.  It takes time and in many cases the results will be disappointing.  If it were easy, every team would be high performing, instead of the one or two that you may have worked on in your entire career.  When someone is motivated to move down that path, you should use the following guidelines: 

  • Empower the team.  Teams, like individuals, will mature over time if they are allowed to make more and more of the decisions that impact them.  If the team is kept on a short leash and must always ask for direction from the manager, they will have little incentive or desire to mature toward high performance.  It is possible that a high-performing team does not need a formal manager at all.  To reach this stage, however, the manager must allow the team to make as many of its own decisions as is practical.  As the team gets more mature, they should be given even more discretion.  On a high-performing team, the manager acts more like a coach offering advice, rather than as a formal manager that tells everyone what to do.  

  • Establish team processes.  The team needs to have good processes to follow for handling issues, change requests, status reporting, etc.  Team members need to understand how things get approved, how to surface potential risks and what deliverables should look like.  Some of these processes should exist already, but many probably are not formally defined.  If possible, these processes should be consistent throughout the organization.  However, if no consistent processes are available for the entire organization, then the entire team can work and agree on them when the project is starting.

  • Invest in training.  In a perfect world, the manager and the entire team would have experience in the technology being utilized and in the subject matter being delivered.  Members would know the organization and the politics.  In the real world, however, the manager and the team rarely have all the right skills needed.  They need to understand what they do not know and try to get to the right level of expertise as quickly as possible.  This usually implies being as liberal with training as possible while you are guiding a team down this path.   This includes technical, professional, and business training.  Also, consider specific team building and other training designed to show a team how to work effectively together.  This can compress the time required to reach the higher levels of team performance.

  • Be flexible.  It is hard to know and plan everything.  One of the key characteristics of a successful manager is to be comfortable working in an environment where change is a constant.  If the manager works effectively in this environment, the workload will be updated on a continual basis and will accurately reflect what needs to be done to complete the project.  The manager is also able to effectively deal with changing team dynamics over time.

  • Monitor team dynamics and progress.  Once the team is in place and well trained, it should be monitored to make sure the team members are progressing well and moving toward a state of higher efficiency and effectiveness.  The manager should constantly reinforce good behaviors and deal with problems when they occur.  When the team is really high performing, it tends to deal with its own problems before they are surfaced outside the team.