Communication Excellence in Project Management

Good article in HuffPost Business about beating task saturation with operational elasticity. I didn't know the actual names of these two terms but, I certainly know feeling of being overwhelmed with tasks and not having the organizational resources to lighten the load of too many tasks.

Task saturation can lead to employees shutting down or hyper-focusing on a single task. Task saturation can not only harm employees, it can destroy organizations.

"Task saturated employees may often start to shut down and channelize on one problem. . . . Some channelize to a point where they are dropping some of the most important elements that can keep your jet in the air or in business, keep your business alive. Agility is lost and if an issue comes up and is not in the channel they are dealing with at that point in time, they are going to ignore it. . . . With zero to minimal operational elasticity you often find teams having high stress levels, pushing back, starting to take more time off, basically - shutting down. As operational elasticity decreases, performance decreases and executional errors increase."

There are five ways to increase operational elasticity and prevent task saturation:

1. Build a pipeline of talent.

2. Set clear expectations and have frequent performance debriefs.

3. Establish agility in the organization.

4. Recognize employees for their work and contributions.

5. A coherent, consistent, and communicated strategic narrative.

Task elasticity may be more of a problem for project teams because of the heavy schedule and resource constraints. In the above list, there are three methods in which communication helps to build operational elasticity. Good project managers already know to set clear expectations, recognize project team members, and deliver a compelling [project] strategy narrative.

So, what does operational elasticity look like in project teams?

Good article in the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review about the importance of managing the emotional culture of organizations. Essentially, leaders should recognize the emotions that help the organization succeed, model the positive emotions, and help employees develop those positive emotions. Much of this has already been studied and verified by the positive psychology. However, it seems that it would take some time to develop a good emotional culture.

Thus, my question: given the temporary and short-term nature of project teams, how does a project manager build a positive emotional culture? Or should a positive emotional culture be a concern for the project manager? Should a project manager select project team members not only on skills and abilities but, also, their ability to contribute to a positive emotional culture?

A colleague recently sent me two articles on employee engagement. The first article was from Forbes magazine with the provocative title – “The End of ‘Employee Engagement?’” You often see these types of articles whenever a new management method or trend is perceived to be nearing its end. The author used the alleged decline of total quality management to argue that the same pattern is happening to employee engagement. The hype; the overnight rise of a consulting industry; the lack of immediate, significant results; and the eventual disillusionment. Gartner Research famously calls this the “Hype Cycle.”

The second article comes from a regular contributor to the Association for Talent Development’s website. This author disputes the Forbes article by pointing out the elephant in the room – the 70% of the workforce that still reports being disengaged. Instead of bemoaning the fact that employee engagement has become a check-the-box activity, Kevin Sheridan calls for a renewed effort to hold managers and leaders accountable. For the organizations that did the work, TQM was a transformative success. So can employee engagement; if the organizations put effort into it. 

In my research, I have seen a link between good organizational health and robust employee engagement. A healthy organization rallies the employees around a common purpose; provides the employees with the tools, training, and support to accomplish the common purpose; and continues to build capacity for sustained performance. I’ve also noticed a trend that the healthier organizations also seemed to be the ones that are more accomplished at project management. In full disclosure, I do not have actual empirical evidence for a link between project management and organizational health. Even so, there is something in my preliminary analysis that calls for further study. 

According to much of the engagement research, highly-engaged employees share three characteristics.  

1. employees who have a clear sense of purpose about their work
2. employees receive frequent feedback on their efforts
3. employees can see how the customers will use the products/services created from the employee’s work.

Highly engaged employees are also given much autonomy and are encouraged to master their skills. This sounds like how project teams routinely operate. Also, good project managers practice servant leadership and frequently communicate with their teams.  Another example of how common project management practices are inherently built for employee engagement.

So, let me ask you: do you think that good project management is inherently good employee engagement? That training functional managers and senior managers in project management could increase the managers’ employee engagement skills? That project-based organizations are healthier and have better employee engagement than functional and matrix organizations?
 

Implementing policy is just as vital as creating the policy. Agencies need the ability to effectively execute and manage policies. In my research about how government agencies are designed and managed, there are three concepts that can be useful for understanding how agencies can successfully execute their missions and policies. Using organizational health, organizational agility, and network health is the best guide to reforming government agencies.

Technology and societal changes have created new types of private sector organizations that did not exist 20 years ago. New challenges like climate change and terrorism have also created new demands on governments to respond effectively. Agencies must evolve to meet citizen needs and demands. The question is how to help agencies evolve effectively.

Organizational Health

Organizational health is defined by Keller and Price in their 2011 book, Beyond Performance, as “the ability of an organization to align, execute and renew itself . . . so that it can sustain exceptional performance over time.” For government agencies, organizational health is how effectively the people, processes and technologies are aligned with the agency’s strategic goals. Under the Keller and Price model, agencies would be measured along three dimensions: internal alignment, quality of execution and capacity for renewal. In other words; is everyone in the agency working toward the same goals and can they achieve these goals now and in the future?

To answer, agencies should examine their performance on the following nine elements (adopted from Keller and Price):

Direction – a clear sense of where the organization is heading and how it will get there that is meaningful to all employees.

Leadership – the extent to which leaders inspire actions by others.

Culture and climate – the shared beliefs and quality of interactions within and across organizational units.

Accountability – the extent to which individuals understand what is expected of them, have sufficient authority to carry it out and take responsibility for delivering results.

Coordination and control – the ability to evaluate organizational performance and risk, and to address issues and opportunities when they arise.

Capabilities – the presence of institutional skills and talent required to execute strategy and create competitive advantage.

Motivation – the presence of enthusiasm that drives employees to put in the extraordinary effort to deliver results.

External orientation – the quality of engagement with customers, suppliers, partners and other external stakeholders to drive value.

Innovation and learning – the quality and flow of new ideas and the organization’s ability to adapt and shape itself as needed.

Organizational Agility

Organizational health is necessary but not sufficient. An agency must have organizational agility to maintain organizational health. Federal agencies have a long tradition of organizational structures with firm boundaries (established by organizational charts) and strict internal and external areas of formal authority (statutes, regulations, executive orders, policies, inter-agency working agreements, etc.). Increasingly, however, agencies are recognizing that they, too, exist in a complex adaptive system. Agencies have permeable boundaries that are impacted daily by external factors (i.e., budgets, social media, unexpected crises), which in turn affect how agencies achieve their missions.

Organizational agility has become and will continue to be a requirement for federal organizations as external environmental factors (e.g., budget fluctuations, changes in public expectations, unforeseen crises) become more complex and unpredictable. This continuous change requires that modern organizations acquire a flexible and responsive approach to managing people, processes and technology to achieve their missions. Agencies must now build capacity to manage change while pursuing optimal performance and mission accomplishment. Managing with agility incorporates the notion of being flexible and open to adopting new business processes, while adapting an organization’s mindset and culture to constant change. Agencies must enable leaders, managers and employees to align toward outcomes while constantly scanning for projected changes and preparing to adapt to new requirements and expectations.

Network Health

I am still working on the network health concept, but it has similarities to organizational health. In network health, healthy and agile organizations replace people in the people, processes and technology triad of organizational health. As Innes and Booher write in Planning with Complexity,

“[a]t its heart, adaptive governance is about harnessing the power of networks – networks that connect people, ideas, and knowledge in changing combinations across organizations and public problems.”

No single government agency, no matter how healthy and agile, can work alone in solving many of the larger challenges facing governments today. It will take a network to manage these problems.

The New Government Agency

I do not yet know what the ideal organizational design is for government agencies. Maybe there is an entire group of organizational designs specific to the mission. Maybe agencies will cycle through a series of organizational designs based on the challenges the agency faces. Whatever the design of the agency, the successful agencies will have organizational health, be agile and are valuable contributors in a healthy network of agencies and other entities.

(Originally appeared in PATimes.org at http://patimes.org/redesigning-government-agencies-organizational-health-organizational-agility-network-health/)