Maintaining Morale

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Communications Management   Talent Management  

You know, writing articles for gantthead lately has been depressing. I seem to have started so many of them talking about the recession, the lack of a convincing recovery, ever-shrinking budgets and ever-increasing demands to do more with less. And now along comes January and gantthead’s cheery topic of the month: how the economy is affecting project management.

Talk about a morale killer.

So let’s look at that issue of morale. As project managers, how do we maintain (or if necessary, rebuild) morale in our teams? It’s a vital part of the job; without it, we are facing a project disaster. But it is no easy feat at a time when resources are tired, frustrated, concerned for their own future and fed up of hearing the same old stuff about how important they are to the success of the project.

Now is the time to cash in the goodwill from the “good times”
If you are fortunate enough to have been working with at least some of your team members for a while, then they will have seen how you lead them when things were better. They will know that you are not just regurgitating outdated platitudes now, but that you genuinely do appreciate their efforts and the commitment that they make to the projects that they work on. You can’t survive simply on your reputation as a good leader, but neither should you underestimate the power of a good …

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