Does Your Team Trust You?

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   Leadership  

Every now and then I take to flights of fancy and wonder what might happen in different situations. I recently started imagining what might happen if I said this to some of the most important customers and stakeholders that I deal with: “Trust me, I’m a project manager.”

As project managers, we are leaders in the organization—we are accountable for delivering successful initiatives, we have the responsibility of building and leading teams, we have the future of the organization’s success in our hands. It’s a high-pressure job at times, and one that requires many different stakeholder groups to trust our ability to deliver. Without that trust, we simply couldn’t do our jobs.

If our teams don’t trust us, then they won’t follow our lead or be committed to the project. If our sponsor doesn’t trust us, then they won’t give us the freedom we need to manage the project our way. If the customer doesn’t trust us, then their impression of the solution that is ultimately delivered will be affected. And ultimately, if the organization as a whole doesn’t trust us, we won’t be given the opportunity to lead future initiatives.

But trust isn’t a binary thing; it isn’t there or missing. There are degrees of trust, and that’s what I ponder when I think about potential responses to me …

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