ProjectsAtWork

Decision-making is an important part of what project leaders do. But that doesn’t mean they should make all the decisions.

You have talented people on your project team. Right? They have the technical skills and knowledge needed to execute the plan, to deliver value, to make stakeholders happy. But the other day, a couple members of the team asked you if they should go with technical option A or B. What do you do? In many cases, the best answer is to choose neither.

That’s because there are times when you should not decide, specifically in areas of expertise where the decision is better delegated. By making the decision in these situations, you are practicing "reverse delegation," and it can cause problems down the road.

When you make a decision that someone else has the expertise or experience to make, you are diminishing their ownership of the solution—and their investment in the entire project, for that matter. Worse, you’re shutting down an opportunity to build confidence in your team members that will help when other issues need to be faced in the future.

It's easy to fall into the reverse delegation trap, though—especially if you came up from a technical background. If you’ve become a project leader after years of working on technical issues, you might want to continue to oversee those decisions on your team. But remember, those technical folks on your team are like you once were, and they probably have more current knowledge about certain aspects of the project than you do.

So, make a conscious decision to delegate more decisions.

First, recognize that team members have a natural inclination to consult you. They know the project manager is the one person putting their reputation on the line for the project, and they want to know what you think. But remind team members of their role and value on the project.

Of course, it is still your responsibility as a project leader to examine whether there is an underlying problem that might hinder your team’s ability to make decisions. Ask yourself these questions and correct accordingly:

1. Do team members understand stakeholder values and project priorities? Set the stage early for good decisions by communicating clearly about the project charter, scope and stakeholder expectations—and how they relate to the decision criteria of cost, schedule and quality.

2. Do team members feel empowered to make decisions? Consider whether they are comfortable with and confident in their position. Some people want to give decisions back to the project manager so that they are free of the consequences.

And there will always be cases when you should still be the decider.

If the team can't agree, you need to break the deadlock so the project can proceed. Does one approach carry more risk than another, for example? But do this as infrequently as possible because ultimately it takes away some of the empowerment you had hoped to use to your project’s advantage.

You’ve been on teams, so you already know from experience that many, if not most, decisions are best made closest to where the actual work is being done. Now’s your turn as a leader to make sure that happens on your projects.

Inspiration is the great intangible that can push teams to greater heights. Can you instill it?

It’s true: money can motivate some people. So can fear. But at the end of the day, if someone does not want to do something, they most likely won't. They most definitely won't do it well.

Every project leader knows the frustration of trying to motivate an underperforming or unwilling team member. But there are ways to cultivate an atmosphere where motivation has a chance to grow, where so-called “lost causes” can find their value. It happens when leaders recognize individuality, be inclusive and build trust.

One of the best ways to motivate people is to include them in decisions. If someone has been excluded from a decision that affects their work, they’re not going to feel that they are a contributing, respected member of the team. Inclusion can inspire a non-engaged team member to get more involved.

Inclusion goes hand in hand with treating each team member as an individual. In project work, people are motivated by different things and at different times. Some people, for example, enjoy making decisions with quick results; they feel most comfortable toward the end of a project when daily decisions bring them nearer the finish line. Others thrive on generating ideas and are happiest at the beginning of a project, when people are brainstorming and defining the work ahead.

The key to keeping people motivated is to accommodate differing work approaches. Look at the goals throughout the project and at the people who are going to be most influential and beneficial. That shifts as you proceed through the project. You don't change the team. You phase on and off people based on what they're driven by.

In order to motivate people, you really have to understand what people want. You've got to offer them something that touches their heart, their passion.

To help people connect with their inner drive, project managers should provide clear expectations, direction in the work, opportunities to perform, open and timely feedback, rewards and ongoing support. They should involve them in preparing plans and in deciding, as a team, what the rewards for their work will be.

Finally, trust-building fuels and sustains motivation. A team works best when its members trust the project manager and each other. Demonstrating trustworthiness means recognizing that people make mistakes and do not deserve punishment when they do. In an environment where people trust their managers and each other, they feel empowered to take initiative in their work.

Spend time with each person on your team. Really listen to their ideas, opinions and concerns. It's also important to respect their commitments to other projects. And even more important to show that you acknowledge their lives outside of work.

Remember, inspiration may be the great intangible. But it requires tangible commitment and action from you.

Does your organization practice diversity? I’m not talking about a Human Resources handbook that covers equal opportunity hiring and anti-discrimination policies—every organization checks those legal boxes. I’m talking about embracing diversity. I’m talking about demanding true diversity.

The latest Pulse of the Profession In-Depth Report from Project Management Institute—A Case for Diversity—is a timely one. It shows the value and benefits of inclusive project teams, shows where companies are currently in their attitudes versus actions, and offers a blueprint for making diversity a reality. All project professionals should read it, and make sure their executive leaders find a copy in their in-boxes as well.

Most project leaders already recognize that culturally diverse and gender diverse teams increase project value—88 percent, according the report. They know a “mix of mindsets” leads to fresh approaches, faster problem-solving and far better solutions.

“Being able to draw from a spectrum of backgrounds and experiences”—be it race, age, gender, sexual orientation, culture or nationality—“fuels innovation, unleashing perspectives that might otherwise go unconsidered,” the report states.

But knowing and doing are two very different things. Large gaps exist between what organizations proclaim and what they have actually achieved. Only 33 percent of respondents say their organization has a culturally diverse senior leadership team, and nearly 60 percent say there isn’t a single female in their C-suite.

Cross-cultural awareness and communication are also lagging. Half of respondents say their organization is below average at educating teams on cultural norms and practices to improve collaboration with global stakeholders. And just 18 percent say their organization offers a formal mentorship program to develop project leaders.

Diversity requires action. To build inclusive, future-ready project teams, organizations need executive sponsors such as chief diversity officers to lead the charge and make sure the message of inclusion is heard at every layer of the org chart, the report states. “Companies can also boost diversity with distributed teams, drawing in talent from different locations—with different voices and different ways of working.”

Networking groups, mentorship programs and focused recruiting efforts are all fundamental to developing diversity in the workplace.

The diversity dividend—the ROI in inclusion—is real. The report finds that clients want to see themselves reflected in the project teams they call on to execute their strategic goals, and that Gen Z's best and brightest want to work for companies that demonstrate a commitment to diversity.

A Case for Diversity concludes with three principles that organizations should focus on to make diversity a reality:

> Walk the Walk: The desire for diversity and inclusion is clear—but ambitions must be backed by actions. To achieve real outcomes, organizations need a strategic plan.

> Reexamine Assumptions: The post-COVID-19 reality is revealing new ways of looking at inclusion. By tapping into technology and rethinking the old office requirements to allow for more distributed teams, companies can reach valuable new talent pools and ensure diversity.

> Reflect Your Audience: There’s value in visibility. To attract and retain employees, clients and business partners, organizations must assemble teams that truly reflect their diverse audiences. With the right mix of perspectives, companies can better understand—and deliver on—what end-users really want out of a project.

Future-ready project teams will be diverse teams. Demand nothing less.

Download A Case for Diversity here.

What, in your experience, are the biggest barriers to driving an innovation from within?

This is the question Dr. Kaihan Krippendorff asked 150 “internal innovators”—employees leading innovation efforts within their organizations— over the course of three years while conducting research for his book, Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs. He took their responses and then interviewed innovation experts such as Bharat Anand (Harvard), Steve Blank (Silicon Valley), George Day (Wharton), John Hagel (Deloitte’s Center for the Edge and Singularity University), Gary Hamel (London Business School), Roger Martin (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto), and Rita McGrath (Columbia) to capture their points of view.

His discovery: there are seven common barriers to innovation:

1. Intent: Many would-be internal innovators have simply given up trying; they have abandoned the intent to find and pursue new innovations.

2. Need: Most employees do not understand what kinds of innovations their organizations need (e.g., less than 55% of middle managers can name even two of their company’s top strategic priorities), so for ideas, they look in the wrong places and then propose ideas of little strategic value.

3. Options: Would-be internal innovators often grow frustrated because they become fixated too early on a few, or even worse just one, innovative idea, instead of continually generating a flow of new ideas and managing them like a portfolio of options.

4. Value blockers: It is commonly accepted that innovative ideas are inconsistent with, and therefore disruptive to, a company’s current business model. This established model creates erect value blockers that prevent an appropriate new business model from forming around the new idea.

5. Act: Established organizations tend to ask one to prove an idea will work before giving permission to take action. Yet most new ideas are better suited to the opposite approach: taking action in order to prove the idea. This puts would-be internal innovators in a catch-22: they cannot prove their idea will work so they cannot take action.

6. Team: Scaling new ideas often requires one to pull together a cross-silo team that runs at a rapid pace and is geared toward learning rather than delivering results. Corporations are geared for the opposite: they are siloed, act slowly, and value results (over learning).

7. Environment: Getting support for new ideas is politically complicated because the leadership behavior, types of talent, organizational structures, and cultural norms that help established organizations sustain their core operations also tend to hinder internal innovativeness. Would-be internal innovators struggle to find “islands of freedom” from which they can access the talent, structures, cultural norms, and leadership support that support attempts at innovation.

"Successful innovators understand that, while any one of the seven barriers can crop up at any time, there is usually a natural flow to the sequence of events, a sequence that outlines a pathway of innovation," says Krippendorff. “Their ability to recognize and control that sequence, to the greatest extent possible, plays a big role in their ultimate success. I also realized that if we turn those seven barriers around and look at the obverse, we see solutions.”

To that point, Krippendorff outlines seven steps to building an innovation team, each of which we have begun presenting in greater detail here on ProjectManagement.com:

1. Remove organizational friction: Walk through the five points of organization friction (resources, rewards/expectations, risk-taking, senior leadership support, and organizational freedom), and identify what you must do to address, or at least anticipate, each one.

2. Assemble a cross-functional team: Pull together a team of between five and ten people with the right mix of functional backgrounds, who are learners (high educational level) and unrestrained by accepted dogmas (low tenure). [see “Start Building an Innovation Team”]

3. Align around an important goal: Complete a V2MOM to align the team passionately behind a compelling shared vision, with an understanding of what specifically qualifies as winning and what obstacles you will face. [This acronym stands for: Vision, Value, Metrics, Obstacles and Measures—for a deeper dive, see “Build Team Commitment to a Goal”]

4. Use metrics and data to track the most important thing(s): Decide which leading metrics your team should focus on.

5. Build a scoreboard everyone can see: Decide on a display for your team and individual metrics.

6. Establish a rapid rhythm: Agree on the frequency with which you will review your team’s progress, and set an agenda for that meeting.

7. Generate positive velocity: Celebrate early wins; allow people to strive beyond what is easy by allowing for failure.

Whether you’re an executive, project manager or team member, these are great, actionable steps to support innovation efforts in your organization. And there’s also a great piece of advice to remember for each step of your innovation journey—from Gary Pisano, senior associate dean of faculty development at Harvard Business School and author of Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation:

“The all-or-nothing approach to solving problems makes for great theater. It does not, however, bear much resemblance to how actual big problems are solved in society, business, or science. Big problems typically get tackled through a series of small solutions, each of which on its own may not seem particularly important, but that together can have a huge impact.

“We need to be thinking about a big set of ‘small’ solutions rather just a small set of ‘big’ solutions.”

With the pandemic forcing so many project teams to work from home, no doubt you're holding tons of virtual meetings. But are you making the most of them? 

Working from home (or WFH) is quickly becoming "the new normal." The COVID-19 pandemic kicked the WFH movement into high gear, and many experts believe it will continue long after the crisis has passed. But before we can optimize this new way of working, we're all going to have to get proficient at one of the biggest work-from-home fundamentals: the virtual meeting.

"Remote meetings are inherently different from in-person meetings," says Howard Tiersky, coauthor along with Heidi Wisbach of Impactful Online Meetings: How to Run Polished Virtual Working Sessions That Are Engaging and Effective. "If you're not used to running them, you're going to make tons of mistakes. And those mistakes can have major ramifications in terms of how well people perform once they log off and get back to work."

The good news is that well-run online meetings can be extremely powerful, says Tiersky. In fact, according to the Harvard Business Review, online meetings can be even more effective than in-person meetings when done right. But first you need to be aware of what not to do. Tiersky identifies five common mistakes made in virtual meetings:

1. Neglecting one (or more) of the "big five" success keys of online meetings. If you are seeking to bring people together to share information, come up with solutions, make decisions, coordinate activities, and/or socialize, you will be successful if you:

1. Have a clear purpose 
2. Get participants in the right mindset 
3. Get them fully engaged behaviorally 
4. Incorporate high-quality content aligned with the purpose 
5. Make it easy to participate

"If you do all of these correctly, you will have high-impact online meetings," Tiersky says. "If you don't, there's going to be a lot of awkwardness and inefficiency. Worse, bad meetings can lead to bad workplace performance, which is the last thing any of us need right now."

2. Holding voice calls instead of videoconferences. When everyone has their cameras on, you can expect a significant improvement in the effectiveness of online meetings. This keeps people engaged because they know that what they're doing is visible to everyone else. They're far less likely to multi-task, which is one of the greatest obstacles to audience engagement.

3. Failing to be strategic about sequencing. The first item on your meeting agenda should be a restatement of the purpose of the meeting. After that, strategize on the sequence of your activities. For example:

• If there are any "elephant in the room" topics, deal with those early or they will be a distraction. 
• If you have some sort of fun or exciting announcement, you may want to hold it for the end, letting the participants know that it is coming but keeping the outcome a surprise to create suspense. 
• If an agenda item may be intense or create some heated discussion, put it in the middle—get people warmed up and feeling productive first, then hit them with the challenging topic.

4. Not giving people an active role. It's possible for one person to present content, facilitate questions, ensure the meeting stays on time, and take notes, but why? Seek to distribute the roles of facilitator (responsible for running the agenda), presenter (responsible for sharing specific units of content), timekeeper (watches the clock and alerts facilitators and presenters how to adjust their speed and content), and the notetaker (documents the meeting) among the participants. 

"When you give participants something to do, you prevent them from being passive listeners or webinar watchers," Tiersky says. "When people have an active role, they are far, far more attentive and engaged."

5. Failing to take advantage of breakouts. In most meetings of more than eight people, usually most of the talking is done by just five to seven participants. This is one reason why during live workshops Tiersky often breaks larger groups into breakout teams, so they can come up with ideas, work on prioritization, action planning—whatever the work is—in smaller groups and then come back to the larger group and report on the work they did. (Several of the major online meeting platforms including Zoom and Google Hangouts now offer breakouts.)

"We give each team clear instructions for the work they are to do, in writing, and then usually give them a small amount of time to do it, like 20 to 40 minutes," he says. "A compressed time frame forces the group to organize quickly; get to work; and focus on progress, not process or perfection. I've been amazed over the years that sometimes when clear instructions, a small team, and a tight time frame are combined like that, you get work done in a half hour that might have taken days, weeks, or months if done 'the usual way.'"

These are just a few of the mistakes people regularly make. There are plenty more. The good news is most of these are easy enough to correct once you realize you're making them.

"When done correctly, online meetings are an incredibly powerful method of enabling collaborative work," Tiersky says. "It's worth investing a bit of time and effort in learning how to maximize them. Frankly, they have the potential to move the needle for your business, and right now, this is more important than it's ever been."