Learn about the factors that create successful project teams.

Hello and welcome to our impactful projects and Planning series. In today's session, we will talk about the factors that create successful project teams.

As project managers, we may spend much of our time thinking about external stakeholders, like clients or users, but our project team is also a key group of project stakeholders. These are the folks doing the work of the project. So it's critical that we create a collaborative environment that supports our project's success.

But creating a successful project team is not easy, especially for projects in mission driven environments. Unlike many for profit environments, we rarely work with dedicated project teams, meaning that most of our project team members are shouldering many other responsibilities with our project being an extra item on their already full plate. We may also have diverse project teams made up of colleagues, volunteers, board members, partners and other stakeholders who may have never worked together before. These team members may also represent very different departments and perspectives, and they may even represent varying levels of organizational hierarchy. Creating a successful project team is also always challenged by time we may only be working together for a few months. So how do we quickly create the team cohesion and collaboration that we need for our project to be successful, whether it's a project team or an internal department, research indicates that highly successful teams share three common characteristics, engagement, purpose and trust.

If we want to run successful projects, we need to create a collaborative and effective team environment. So we also want to aim for high engagement, clear purpose and a culture of trust. So let's talk about how these characteristics are displayed in successful teams, and some strategies we can use to support these characteristics in our own project teams. So let's begin with engagement in successful teams. Engagement shows up in a couple of different ways. Team members are accountable to each other and for the work they are doing in successful teams, we also see a lot of team discussion and an attempt to reach consensus. Engaged teams also participate in shared decision making, and there is a culture of learning. Team members are willing and able to learn new skills to support the work, and they are willing to share what they know with each other. So how can we encourage high engagement like this? In our project teams,

there are four engagement strategies that I want to talk about, clear roles and tasks, shared progress, intentional discussion and team member collaboration. So a simple way to support engagement and accountability is to make sure project roles and task assignments are clear. So what is expected of each project team member, what tasks and activities will they need to complete? This can be accomplished by establishing clear roles within the project and the project team and assigning tasks to one or more team members. This may seem like project management 101, but I see a lot of project teams where roles and assignments are not clear and where who is doing what is not well communicated to the entire team. A related engagement strategy is to share progress about project and task completion, so once everyone knows what they need to do, given those clear roles and tasks, we also want to make sure that team members know what other team members are working on. So transparency into roles and task assignments is a start, but we also want team members to share progress on those tasks. Project management tools work well to give team members that insight into who is working on what and what the static status is of these various tasks, but this can also be accomplished without tools. So we can use shared documents, we can use messages. Our goal is to create transparency about engagement that's.

Supports accountability

to encourage engagement in our project teams. We also want an intentional approach to communication, much like we plan how to communicate with users, decision makers, other stakeholder groups, we also want to plan how our project team will communicate, and beyond kind of setting communication expectations as much as possible, we want to encourage discussion among our team. This means that we need to be intentional, intentional about how team meetings are structured. So long, rambling meetings kill engagement, while we want to make sure folks are sharing progress. Meetings shouldn't just be these like round robin status updates. Instead, we want to use our team meeting time for brainstorming, problem solving, decision making, to create space for this discussion, this feedback. We want to be sure to share meeting agendas ahead of time, so these things should be on the agenda, and we want people to be prepared to talk about whatever it is we need to discuss for virtual meetings. We may also want to incorporate some interactive elements, breakout rooms, shared whiteboards. Our project team meetings should be engaging, not sap the energy of our team. Another way to encourage engagement in our project teams is to encourage team member collaboration. And so often what this looks like is suggesting that small groups of team members meet outside of our regular team meetings to tackle specific tasks or work on problems together, these working sessions can really help team members build individual bonds and maintain engagement, especially when we have large project teams. So with these engagement strategies, we are nudging our teams toward the accountability and intentional communication and collaboration that supports high engagement to create successful teams, we also want to cultivate purpose. So in successful teams, purpose shows up as having a cleared shared purpose or mission, as well as team members having an understanding of how they can support that purpose. In successful teams, we also see a recognition of individual and team strengths and successes. So how can we support this? In our project teams,

we can be sure to discuss scope, tie tasks to deliverables and celebrate successes.

So projects, in some ways, have an advantage over other types of teams when it comes to purpose, as we have a project scope, or should have a project scope that lays out our purpose, but do all of your team members understand that scope, and do they have the same understanding of it? So we often assume that there is that understanding. But if we really want to cultivate purpose in our project teams, we want to be sure to discuss and confirm that shared understanding of our project scope with the project team. So why are we doing this project? What is our ultimate goal? What are we focusing on during the project? We want to discuss scope during project kickoff, to make sure we are all on the same page, and then keep reminding folks of the scope as the project progresses. Scope sets that shared purpose, but we can really extend purpose to the individual through those clear roles, but also by linking tasks to deliverables, we've talked about the importance of concrete deliverables and other sessions, but making sure that all tasks are connected to a deliverable can really help our team members see their contributions to the project and the purpose. So when my tasks are clearly connected to a deliverable. It's not just one of many. On some long list of tasks, I can see that I am supporting the creation of something bigger, something we're actually going to deliver to our users, our colleagues, our community. I can see my purpose in the project. We create this connection by clearly defining our project deliverables and breaking them into smaller and smaller elements until we get to those tasks that we can assign

to cultivate purpose in our project teams, we can also be sure to celebrate successes, and so do not wait until the end of the Project to say thank you, to acknowledge team contributions. We want to recognize effort and successes during the project. We can use milestones in our project schedule to remind us to celebrate progress and success, whether it's an acknowledgement at a team meeting, a shared lunch at a team meeting, or.

Calling out the team's efforts in a newsletter or at an organizational meeting or event celebrating successes along the way, can help maintain that connection to our project's purpose.

Finally, we also want to create trust in our project teams. So of these three success characteristics. Trust takes more time, and it's often more tricky in project teams. You've probably noticed that engagement and purpose really align with many project management best practices, but trust acts as the foundation of a successful team, and so it's really something that we want to aim for and spend some time on. I love this quote from Stephen Covey because I think it's very true. High trust won't necessarily rescue a poor strategy, but low trust will almost always derail a good one. So we can have the best project plan, but if there is a lack of trust among our stakeholders and our project team, it can derail our project. So in successful teams, trust is displayed in a couple of different ways. There is high psychological safety, and our team members have the ability to take risks and be innovative. Team members cannot take risks that they need to innovate if they do not feel safe and supported. So in successful teams, members are valued and seed for who they are, and they feel comfortable trying new things and bringing up issues. So how do we create this trust in our project teams? First, we can value differences, then acknowledge uncertainty and treat failure as a learning opportunity. So valuing differences is key to creating psychological safety in our project teams, we can be sure to acknowledge the value of different experiences and perspectives that our team members bring to the project. We can recognize that individuals approach problems and tasks differently differently, and we can encourage our teams to see these differences as strengths that can lead to better solutions and projects. We can also give team members the opportunity to voice their ideas and actively invite dissenting opinions and alternative viewpoints. Much of this relates back to intentional communication, but it's not just about communication formats and meeting structure. It's about the environment we are creating for our project team as

a project manager, we can create trust by acknowledging uncertainty, and so we do not have to pretend that we have all the answers. We don't need to brush challenges or uncomfortable issues under the rug. If we are willing to say that we don't know that we are unsure about something, our team members will first appreciate that honesty, but it will also create an environment where they can ask questions, where they can bring up challenges again. This comes back to communication. We can build time to discuss challenges and ask questions into our team meetings, but we also need to handle those conversations well and model this for our teams.

Trust is also created when we treat failure as a learning opportunity. So if something doesn't go well in our project, do we move toward blame, or do we learn from that failure? So innovative teams are willing to share their failures because they know that mistakes will be treated as opportunities to collectively learn and improve. So think about how you dealt with a failure in your last project. Did you discuss it kindly and openly? Did you approach it as a collective challenge, a problem to be solved. Treating failure as a learning opportunity is really one of the best ways to create trust on our teams, including our project teams. Okay, so those are some of the strategies we can use with our project teams to propose engagement, cultivate purpose, create trust, to build more successful, collaborative and effective project teams. Before I take questions, you may be interested in our project retrospective worksheet. You can use this worksheet to gather feedback from your project team and document lessons learned that you can use to build more successful project teams. And so retrospectives are also really great examples of treating failure as learning opportunities, and can help build team trust. This free download of our simple retrospective worksheet is available at YazdaniConsulting.com/resources. If you need support leading projects and teams, visit our project solution.

Page at YazdaniConsulting.com/projects to learn about how I can help. So I'm happy to take questions that you have about project teams. Feel free to add them in the comments. I'll give folks a few moments to add their questions if I am not, excuse me able to answer your question live. I'm happy to answer it later in the comments. You can also find all of the ways to contact me at YazdaniConsulting.com/contact please reach out to me if you'd like to talk more about project teams. Okay, so a question is, what can I do in the middle of a project if my team isn't working well together?

So my recommendation would be to conduct that retrospective that might help you understand what's not working. And we do not have to wait until the end of a project to do a retrospective. We can do it in the middle of a project, at kind of key points, after you do that retrospective, and maybe have some insight into what what is sort of going wrong, you may find that you need to do a bit of a team reset. And so we want to be transparent about this and kind of bring our team into this conversation. And so we might say, you know, what do we need to do to make our team, our project, more successful? Are there ways that we can improve our communications, improve our meetings, improve the ways that we're working together, and then those ideas that you generate, you can try to implement. I do think if you present this as a team issue that you want to solve together, rather than kind of a project manager's problem, you also are modeling a really great way to work together. So it's not too late. Have some conversations about what could be better and then work on implementing it. Great. So feel free to comment or reach out if you have any additional questions, and thank you for participating in our impactful projects and Planning series. Visit YazdaniConsulting.com/IPP to find out about upcoming sessions and to view recordings of all of the sessions in this series. Thank you.