How to Assess and Improve Team & Leader Engagement

Bruce is the founder of ProjectManagementHacks.com, a resource for growing IT project managers.

  Communications Management   Leadership   Talent Management  

The PMI Pulse of the Profession® report on The Future of Project Work: Moving Past Office-Centric Models shares fascinating insights about the current state of project work. In particular, the data on remote work and flexible work arrangements are striking.

In particular, project performance rates by work location:

• Remote work: 73.2%
• Hybrid location work: 73.4%
• In-person work: 74.6%

Pro-flexibility preferences probably offset the very small performance edge of in-person work. The PMI report found that “four out of five employees who have worked in these flexible work models over the past two years want to retain them.”

For now, let’s assume that different ways of working are equal from a productivity standpoint. In addition, we’ll assume that fully remote and hybrid models are here to stay. The question now becomes: Do we know how to engage effectively in this context?

The engagement triangle is my model to diagnose and improve flexible work success.

Introducing the Engagement Triangle
Like PMI’s Talent Triangle®, the engagement triangle comprises three equal parts: self, leader and team. As you improve each element, it becomes easier to achieve success:

1. Leader engagement: For our purposes, a highly engaged leader is a person with oversight or management control over the project. In this context, “…

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