A Simple Trick to Enhance Project Team Harmony

 

For my next installment on October’s theme, leadership, I’m going to remind my readers of the blindingly obvious: contentious project teams do not perform nearly as well as harmonious ones. On those occasions where your team does not steadily progress through the clichéd stages of Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing, what strategies are available to combat project team infighting?

For this analysis I’d like to turn to one of the “games” – actually, an analogous set of stated interactive parameters – that I referenced in the book that this blog is named after, Game Theory in Management, titled Hawk/Dove. As the name implies, this game involves two types of birds, or, more specifically, fairly generic birds that can choose a passive strategy (“Dove”), or an aggressive one (“Hawk”).

In all variants of the Hawk/Dove game, the overall population’s payout is maximized if every bird selects a Dove strategy, i.e., they each forage for food, and consume or keep all that they gather. However, if the available food supply is less than can support the population of birds, then the only way for a given bird to survive would be to adopt a more aggressive Hawk strategy, one where the survivor either takes the food other birds have collected, or else stops them from foraging in the first place.

Even in those instances where there is more than enough food to support the population, the introduction of just one Hawk – or one bird that consistently selects the Hawk strategy – will result in a change of behavior in the entire population. Collectively they will arrive at what’s known in Game Theory as the Nash Equilibrium, which is that point at which there is no advantage to be gained on the part of any one player by altering their strategy or strategies. In the 100-bird variant of Hawk/Dove, the Nash Equilibrium is 25%/75% Hawk-Dove, meaning that either 25% of the birds act like Hawks all the time, or else all of the birds act like Hawks one-quarter of the time.

I can hear y’all now – “Hey, Michael, enough with the birds! My project team members are giving each other the bird! You said you had a simple trick…”  Okay, okay, back to the project team.

Your team’s members may not be hurting for food (or a paycheck), but promotions, raises, bonuses, and other forms of recognition are generally more scarce, scarce enough to induce some aggressive behavior in certain team members. The aggressive strategies do not include stealing other team members’ lunches out of the refrigerator (on second thought, though, they might); rather, they involve attempts to change management perceptions. This strategy involves four tactics:

·         Maximize the perceived value of the contributions of the instigator,

·         Minimize the perceived impact of the errors of the instigator,

·         Maximize the impact of the mistakes of the target(s), and

·         Minimize the value of the contributions of the target(s).

What do these four tactics all have in common? They require the instigator to communicate with the PM. So, what’s the simple trick that defeats them all simultaneously?

Forbid ex parte conversations.

Any time any team member wants to talk to you about how they see the performance of another member of the team, interrupt them, and arrange for the other person to be in the room prior to continuance of the conversation. It’s pretty automatic: if the instigator has a real problem, he won’t mind airing it out in front of the person perceived to be the cause. If, however, he’s simply trying to cast himself in a better light at the expense of an innocent comrade, he will immediately realize the game is over, and refuse to proceed. It’s not a silver bullet, but by not allowing ex parte conversations, your team will quickly learn to trust you, trust each other, and should begin performing better.

Identifying the person stealing the lunches? That’s a different problem…