What does it take to develop and integrate your project team effectively? As a project manager, what steps must you take to ensure team success?
These five steps promote establishing and sustaining a winning project team.
1. Build a Project Team
Prioritizing team development as an activity from the start of the project will help to improve project team success. Team Development involves coaching each team member to effectively communicate and recognize and accept the different behaviors and the values of people with whom they will be working. Collaboration and communication skills are critical to the success of your project team.
As a team, you will problem-solve and resolve conflict together so gathering a team that possesses excellent intrapersonal skills to recognize effort, unique talents and contributions is important.
2. Maintain a Cohesive Team Through Effective Communication
To sustain a cohesive team environment, you need reliable, relevant, and timely communication. To ensure that all team members are informed, all project information should be reported consistently throughout each phase.
The team should adopt an attitude of sharing to foster a trusting work environment. As a project manager, you should make your team aware of the different means of communication you will be using.
Regular face-to-face meetings help you avoid miscommunication which can often happen through channels such as email or text. Despite busy schedules, meetings should be planned to support ongoing discussions and ensure that deliverables are completed according to the project timeline.
3. Create a Scheme for Reward and Recognition
Completion of a project can be very rewarding for team members. However, the team may be more motivated when their efforts are matched with incentives.
Reinforce team efforts through a recognition and reward scheme, and they will be more focused on deliverables. Celebrating milestones proves to be very motivating for any team. Establish a rewards system and communicate it to the team at the start of the project. It just might positively impact the overall success of the project.
4. Promote a Collaborative Environment
As a project manager, realize that your team is more likely to be successful if you plan together. Through collaborative planning and goal setting, you’ll achieve individual successes that contribute to the overall project goals.
Through collaboration, you will spark creative solutions, team support, and promote individual personal growth. When team members can identify with one another through a shared goal, then a team that is collaborative and cohesive is created.
5. Recognize and Manage Conflict
One of the biggest mistakes that project managers make is assuming that their project team will just naturally fall together and work harmoniously. While this is ideal, teams are composed of people with different personalities.
Your challenge is to facilitate relationships among people of very diverse backgrounds by making them recognize that they all share a mutual goal.
A good project manager knows how to take action when conflicts arise and not just stand back and let things work things out. After all, open communication is something effective project managers promote. Opening up the conversations when issues arise ensures that they will be dealt with quickly before they negatively affect the outcome of the project.
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