Voices on Project Management

By Lynda Bourne

In my last post, I delved into the SCARF model of cognition during a social situation. Created by Dr. David Rock, the model describes the five elements that can be a motivational reward or a threat to an individual: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness.

I tackled status and certainty in part 1 and now turn to the final three elements of SCARF.

Autonomy

Successful autonomy feels great! You have been given a challenge and succeeded. No one likes to be micromanaged. Even in jobs that require close coordination between a number of people (think of production lines), each person—and the group as a whole—needs to feel they have some control over their destiny if you want a motivated team.

The art of providing the right amount of autonomy to each team member is effective delegation. If the delegation is a stretch assignment for the person, make sure someone is available to provide coaching and support to make the learning experience enjoyable. Most people like to learn new skills but hate failing.

Relatedness

A feeling of relatedness is a primary reward for the brain, and an absence of relatedness is a primary threat. The feeling of relatedness is what you get when you belong to a group. Having many positive social connections (e.g., a sense of relatedness) doesn’t just increase your happiness, it can reduce your blood pressure and help you live longer.

The challenge for leaders is to create an inclusive group. Just as your brain automatically classifies situations into possible rewards or threats, it does the same with people, determining, subconsciously, whether each person is a friend or foe. People you don’t know tend to be classified as foe until proven otherwise—including the new team member. Careful planning is needed to build the team initially, and then to introduce new people into a team once it has formed.

How individuals relate is cultural. Some cultures and individuals are highly tactile and enjoy close physical contact—hugs and kisses on the cheek are part of the normal social processes (even in the workplace). Others expect and require more personal space. This is not a problem if everyone is from a similar background, but needs careful management if the team is made up of people from different cultures.

Fairness

Fairness can be more rewarding than money and is probably the only SCARF element that is almost impossible to overdo. The fact that being treated unfairly can generate a strong threat response is unlikely to be a surprise to anyone. What may be a surprise is that a sense of fairness can be significantly rewarding in and of itself.  

Fairness-generated emotions can run high even in mundane situations such as being short-changed at the checkout. The feeling of being taken advantage of can wreck an otherwise great day, despite the relatively insignificant money involved.

The tendency to prefer equity and resist unfair outcomes is deeply rooted in people, to the extent that they are willing to sacrifice personal gain in order to prevent another person from receiving an inequitably better outcome.

It’s especially easy for people or teams to get upset by small injustices when they are tired. Therefore, leaders must ensure fairness both in fact and in perception. They need to do their best to be always seen as doing the right thing by everyone. This is no easy task!

Summary

All the SCARF elements crop up routinely in various theories of motivation. Dr. Rock’s contribution is to tie these factors back to the most fundamental processes in the human psyche.

When a leader gets the mix right, people’s pleasure drives are engaged, serotonin and other hormones are released and they feel good. If the settings are wrong, the limbic system switches to a threat response, which triggers a fight-or-flight reaction.

Either reaction occurs deep in a person’s subconscious and happens far quicker than rational thought. Therefore, the leadership challenge is to create the right environment for the team. Leaders must encourage the positive reactions that appear to lead to the creation of genuine happiness—at least in so far as happiness is driven by the chemical reactions in our brains. 

By Lynda Bourne

In my last post, “Is a Happy Team a Motivated Team?,” I suggested a happy project team was likely to be an outcome of a motivated team, rather than something you achieve in isolation. So this post looks at some of the key elements a project manager can use to develop a motivated team. That, in turn, should lead to a happy group of people who enjoy their work. My next post will examine even more ways to achieve this.

In his book Your Brain at Work, Dr. David Rock defines the “SCARF” model of what happens in the brain during social situations. This model can provide useful insight into the way motivation works. While it may seem odd to some, every team, every project and every workplace is primarily a social situation. People are interacting with other people to achieve something for their stakeholders—who are also people!

The SCARF model defines five elements that can be a motivational reward, or a threat to an individual:

• Status
• Certainty
• Autonomy
• Relatedness
• Fairness

A leader who establishes the right foundation for each of these factors will help build a successful and happy group.

The challenge for a leader is that each of these factors can trigger a threat or a reward experience. Insufficient levels will cause resentment (pain). The right levels will cause pleasure. But too much of any (with the possible exception of fairness) can lead to fear or the feeling of repression (pain). The challenge for every leader is to know enough about your team members to hit the sweet spot of “just right.”

Status

Everyone has a deep human drive for self-esteem or competence, but this is almost never assessed on its own. We are social beings, so our sense of competence appears to be deeply connected to others. What we actually measure is status.

Status means where we are positioned in relation to those around us—the pecking order. A person’s perception of status, and any changes in it, will be experienced as a reward or a threat. A sense of increasing status can be more rewarding than money, and a sense of decreasing status can make you feel like your life is in danger.  

There’s no universal scale for status. When you meet someone new and size up your relative importance, you might do so based on who is older, richer, stronger, smarter or funnier. Whatever framework you think is important, when your perceived sense of status goes up or down, an intense emotional response results.

Because of this, people—and teams—go to tremendous extremes to increase or protect their status. As Dr. Rock says, “The desire to increase status is behind many of society’s greatest achievements and some of our darker hours of destruction.” The challenge for every leader is to respect the status of all of the team members and minimize negative movements.

Conversely, thrusting someone into a high-status role they are not prepared for can be equally destructive. This is why public speaking ranks as one of the biggest fears. The spotlight is on the speaker, it is a high status position, and the person is terrified of failing.

Certainty

A sense of uncertainty about the future generates a strong threat response. Your brain detects something is wrong, and your ability to focus on other issues diminishes. Your brain doesn’t like uncertainty—it’s like a type of pain. Certainty, on the other hand, feels rewarding, and we tend to steer toward it, even when it might be better for us to remain uncertain.

Effective leaders provide enough certainty for their followers to experience the feeling or reward, but not so much as to stifle creativity and innovation. Again, this is a balancing act aimed at hitting the sweet spot and needs to be tailored to the characteristics of each individual. Some people crave stability and certainty; others like a degree of challenge (but not too much).

In my next post, I’ll dive into the rest of the SCARF model to finish my discussion of how to motivate people.

By Christian Bisson, PMP

For project managers, change is constant—inseparable from day-to-day life. And if you work in IT, the pace of change is only getting faster. Unfortunately, human nature makes us reluctant to change. So for project managers and others who want to make change happen, here are a few tips:

1. Help people adapt

No matter the type of change—whether it’s a new technology, a new process or a new methodology—the steeper the learning curve, the fewer people who will be onboard.

Help people adapt to the change with these approaches:

• Build tutorials: Any guide whatsoever will simplify the learning process. It can be very simple or more elaborate, depending on the size of the change. Avoid anything long and tedious. Aim for quick and simple to use, like cheat sheets or interactive tools.
• Offer help: Let people know that you (or someone else) are available to help them. Obviously, make sure it’s true, and appropriate help in a timely manner.
• Plan the change: People should be introduced step by step to the change instead of forced into it all at once. Going at a more reasonable pace will greatly reduce the fear.

2. Show how it’s helping THEM

This tip may not apply for all the changes we want to execute. But let’s say you want to change a tool that a team uses for projects. The team’s initial reaction might be skepticism or resistance.

You want to make sure that people are aware of how the changes are good for THEM—not you or management. In my example above, you could tell team members it’s going to make their overall work easier. They will have a more efficient tool that will quickly give them access to the information they need.

By focusing on that when you brief the others, they will also focus on that while they are juggling their emotions toward the change. As they fight their reluctance, they can remind themselves how the new tool will help them.

3. Ask “Why?”

This tip can be applied once reluctance is detected. It’s easy to insist on something or even to force it on people. But by simply asking why they are reluctant, you may learn that it’s because of simple reasons that can be mitigated. You may even find out that your idea is not as good as you thought, and you can adjust accordingly.

By asking why, rather than assuming you know how the other people feel (or trying to guess), you’ll receive valuable feedback.

Once a colleague was annoyed by new software we were using just because he was receiving too many notifications. I simply guided him toward the notifications preferences, and it made all the difference for him.

4. Don’t give up

Stay positive, and keep it up. The tips above should be repeated as needed.

Share  your tips and stories! I’m certain a lot of you are facing challenges with changes inside your teams.

By Conrado Morlan

Do you know an experienced project manager assigned to a high-visibility project who keeps asking himself and others why he was selected? Colleagues and managers believe this individual is the ideal candidate. He brings strong industry knowledge, leadership skills and relationships across the organization that will lead to a successful project.

Yet he still doubts himself. In fact, it’s estimated that 70 percent of people feel they don’t deserve their station in life.

In the late 1970s, psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes coined the term “Imposter Syndrome” to refer to the idea that capable individuals find it hard to believe in their own capabilities or internalize their own accomplishments. These people see evidence of their competence as mere luck and sometimes feel they are not actually qualified for the position they hold.

For a while, I suffered from the Impostor Syndrome. Then I had two wake-up calls. The first came at the PMI Global Congress 2008—Latin America in São Paulo, Brazil. I met two members of the PMI Mexico Chapter who found out that I had recently achieved the Program Management Professional (PgMP) credential. They were more excited than I was about the achievement. I didn’t realize that I had not made the PgMP credential an important part of me.

The second wake-up call was at the workplace. I was part of a 360-degree evaluation process, and I discovered that the scores I provided to describe my performance were quite a bit lower than the feedback provided by my peers.

In my mind for many years, I was an imposter. In the eyes of others, I was crackerjack.

Have you suffered from the Imposter Syndrome? What was your wake-up call?

by Dave Wakeman

In recent months, I’ve been talking about how to become a more strategic project manager on this blog (see here, here and here). I thought it would be a good idea to circle back and talk about how being an effective communicator will help you be more strategic.

Here are three tips to remember:

1. Communications is at the base of performance.

Never lose sight of the fact that as a project manager, you are basically a paid communicator. And, as a communicator, you have certain responsibilities: being clear, keeping your message concise and making sure you are understood.

If you aren’t meeting these requirements, you are likely going to struggle to achieve success in your projects. In addition, poor communicating may mean you miss the message about why this project is important to the organization. You also may miss information from the team on the ground that would shape the organization’s deliberations about the project.

So always focus on making sure that your communications up and down the organization are clear, concise and understood.

2. A free flow of communications delivers new ideas.

Managing a lot of communications and information is challenging—I get that. But by the same token, if you aren’t exposing yourself to information from many different sources (both inside and outside the organization), you’re likely missing out on ideas that can transform your opinions and open you up to new ways of looking at things.

While being a strong project manager is about having a good, solid framework for decision-making, you aren’t going to have all the technical expertise yourself. In addition, your team may be only focused on the one area that they are in charge of. So it’s important that someone is open to the flow of ideas that can come from any direction and that may have the power to reshape your project in unimaginable ways.

You can achieve this by making sure you have conversations up and down the organization and pay attention to things outside of your scope of work. You never know where a good idea is going to come from.

3. Relationships are the key to project success—and they’re built through communication.

If we aren’t careful, we can forget that our project teams are groups of people with wants and needs. Remember: at the heart of our work are real people whom our projects impact.

That’s why it’s essential that you focus on the human aspect of being a project manager, especially if you want to become a top-notch, strategic project manager. Our human interactions and relationships are the key to our success as project managers.

This is something you should be taking action on all the time. Maybe you start by pulling someone on your team aside for a conversation about what’s going on. Maybe you find out a little more about the person’s home life. Or, you just make sure you have an open-door policy when it comes to information on your projects.

The key is to make sure you give your personal relationships an opportunity to thrive in the project setting.

Let me know what you think in a comment below! 

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