4 Ways to Foster a High-Performing Project Team

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Leadership   Teams  

No matter how good the project manager, the success or failure of a project ultimately relies on the team. This doesn’t mean every team needs to be the best ever assembled, or even necessarily the best team for the project. But it does mean that the project manager should focus on raising the performance bar of the project team—and keep it as high as possible through the lifetime of the project.

Fostering high performance—and creating the right culture throughout the project—is one of the many ways that project managers help their teams succeed, and thus help create successful outcomes. Even though a project manager rarely does any of the actual work on the project, the PM is responsible for getting the most out of the team, and cultivating a high level of performance at a sustained level.

This is made more complicated by the way project teams are usually constructed. A project manager sometimes has the ability to select their team members, but not always; and they are rarely given the opportunity to choose the entire team from people they know and have worked with before.

Generally, every project has a few people who are total strangers to the project manager, and possibly don’t know any of the other team members either. In some ways, this makes the PM’s job harder; they have to start from the beginning with most of the team (also …

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