Building Successful Project Teams

As project managers, we often focus on our external stakeholders – the clients, users, and communities we serve. Another key stakeholder is our project team, and fostering a collaborative environment for them is paramount to our project’s success.

Creating a high-performing project team isn't always easy, particularly when team members are juggling multiple responsibilities and our project is just one more item on their full plates. You may have a diverse team composed of colleagues, volunteers, board members, and partners, some of whom may have never collaborated before. Add in varying organizational levels and perspectives, plus the often-short timelines of projects, and the challenge becomes clear: how do we quickly build the cohesion and collaboration needed for project success?

Research shows that highly successful teams, whether in projects or internal departments, thrive on three core characteristics: engagement, purpose, and trust. Let's explore what these look like and how we can nurture them within our own project teams.

Sparking Engagement

Engagement in a successful team means members feel accountable to each other and for their work. You'll see lively team discussions, efforts to reach consensus, shared decision-making, and a vibrant culture of learning where individuals are eager to learn new skills and share their knowledge.

Here are four strategies to boost engagement in our project teams:

1. Clarify Roles and Tasks: It sounds like Project Management 101, but ensuring everyone knows what's expected of them and what tasks they need to complete is a simple yet powerful way to support engagement and accountability. Clearly communicate who is doing what to the entire team.

2. Share Progress Openly: Once roles are clear, make sure team members are aware of what others are working on. Transparency about task assignments and their status fosters accountability. Project management tools can help, but shared documents or regular update messages work too.

3. Be Intentional About Discussion: Structure team meetings to encourage discussion, brainstorming, problem-solving, and decision-making, rather than just round-robin status updates. Share agendas beforehand so people can prepare. For virtual meetings, consider interactive elements like breakout rooms or shared whiteboards to keep things lively.

4. Encourage Team Member Collaboration: Suggest that smaller groups of team members meet outside regular meetings to tackle specific tasks or problems together. These working sessions can build individual bonds and maintain engagement, especially in larger teams.

Cultivating Purpose

Successful teams have a clear, shared understanding of their purpose or mission, and each member understands how their work contributes to that larger goal. There's also a strong practice of recognizing both individual and team strengths and successes.

Try these approaches to cultivate purpose:

1. Discuss and Revisit Scope: Projects typically have a scope that outlines their purpose, but we shouldn't assume everyone on the team shares the same understanding. Discuss the project's scope during kickoff to confirm that shared understanding and remind the team of the scope as the project progresses to ensure everyone stays on the same page.

2. Tie Tasks to Deliverables: Link every task to a specific project deliverable. This helps team members see how their individual contributions directly support the creation of something tangible and meaningful for users, colleagues, or the community. It helps them see their purpose in the project.

3. Celebrate Successes: Don't wait until the project ends to say thank you or acknowledge contributions. Recognize effort and successes along the way. Use project milestones as reminders to celebrate progress, whether it's a simple acknowledgment in a team meeting, a shared lunch, or a shout-out in a newsletter.

Building Trust

Of these three characteristics, trust often takes the most time to build and can be trickier in project teams. While engagement and purpose align well with many project management best practices, trust is the bedrock of a successful team. As Stephen Covey wisely said, "High trust won't necessarily rescue a poor strategy, low trust will almost always derail a good one". Even the best project plan can be undermined by a lack of trust.

In successful teams, you'll find high psychological safety and comfort in taking risks and being innovative. Team members feel valued for who they are and are willing to try new things and voice concerns.

Here's how to foster trust in a project team:

1. Value Differences: Acknowledge and appreciate the diverse experiences and perspectives your team members bring. Recognize that people approach problems differently, and encourage the team to see these differences as strengths that can lead to better solutions. Actively invite dissenting opinions and alternative viewpoints.

2. Acknowledge Uncertainty: As a project manager, you don't have to have all the answers. Don't sweep challenges under the rug. If you're willing to admit when you don't know something, team members will appreciate the honesty and feel more comfortable asking their own questions and raising challenges. Build time into team meetings to discuss challenges openly.

3. Treat Failure as a Learning Opportunity: When things go wrong, do you look for someone to blame, or do you focus on learning from the experience? Innovative teams are willing to share their failures because they know mistakes will be treated as collective chances to learn and improve. Approach failures as a collective problem to be solved, discussing them kindly and openly.

Moving Forward

By focusing on these strategies for engagement, purpose, and trust, we can build more successful, collaborative, and effective project teams!

If you're looking for tools to help move your team forward, our Project Retrospective Worksheet can be a great way to gather team feedback, document lessons learned, and build trust by treating failures as learning opportunities.