Easy in theory, difficult in practice

During a presentation I delivered today to members of the PMI Nova Scotia chapter on cultivating psychological safety, one of the attendees asked how would she be able to assess whether the team she was going to join was safe prior to joining.

This is a great question because whenever we move to a new company or even a different division in a sufficiently large company, our access to verifiable information is quite limited. For obvious reasons, the leadership of our new team will usually not want to provide evidence of a poor team culture and unless we have trusted connections within the team itself or have access to someone who has recently left the team, it can be difficult to feel confident that we aren't jumping into a snake pit.

It is certainly worth asking your potential new manager questions such as:

• "How much turnover had there been within the team?"
• "Could I see a copy of the team's working agreements?
• "Can you give me an example of a recent time when a team member challenged the status quo?"
• "How frequently do your team members challenge a decision you've made?"

But, I'd also recommend asking the manager to speak one-on-one with a few team members.

If they resist that request, walk away.

But let's say they are open to it.

Here are a few questions to consider asking when you meet with each team member:

• "Think back to the last time you made a mistake with the work you do in the team. How was the news of that mistake received by your manager and your fellow team members?"
• "When was the last time you provided constructive feedback to a fellow team member? How about to your manager?"
• "Can you describe a situation where you challenged a decision which your manager and the majority of the team were endorsing?"
• "Can you think of a time when someone from outside of the team was being overly critical of you or another team member and what did the rest of the team or your manager do?"

While it is quite feasible that one or more of the team members you speak with might be under the manager's thrall, active listening while you ask these probing questions might reveal something different than what the person is saying.

Joining a new organization is fraught with risks but with a little bit of due diligence you can reduce the odds of snake bite!

One of Steve Jobs' most famous quotes comes from the kickoff to the 1997 Apple Think Different campaign: "Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes … the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo." Jobs might have been referring to visionaries or to the customers who crave the products those visionaries produce, but if we want to benefit from diversity, the same applies to the people we hire within our teams.

HBR published an article recently on the subject: "Why You Should Invest in Unconventional Talent". In it, the authors provided some good suggestions on how to hire such round pegs but is hiring where the challenge ends?

Culture gets created by the people within a team and when you introduce someone who is sufficiently different from the others one of two things can happen. Their uniqueness results in a shift within the existing culture or their uniqueness gets suppressed and the culture remains constant. The newcomer's job satisfaction and likelihood of retention are likely to be higher in the former scenario.

Having the team leader remind everyone in the team in the days leading up to the newcomer's arrival that change is uncomfortable and that the team will be going back through the forming-storming-norming phases but that they should be mindful of their reactions to the new team member's behavior can help.

Effective onboarding is crucial, especially when it comes to helping the newcomer learn the team's way of working.

If there are a few ground rules which the team highly values and is unwilling to change, those should be explicitly communicated to the new team member. This should have happened during the hiring process but if not it needs to be part of the the initial orientation phase. This is not to say that the new arrival shouldn't be encouraged to question the rationale behind those agreements, especially if they feel the rules will pose a challenge to them. And if there is a very good reason why those rules might need to be tweaked, the team should be open to that, otherwise they will be sending a clear message to the new arrival that they are going to be "Borg'ed". Once they get their feet wet, the new team member should also be given the opportunity to add to the team's working agreements.

Assigning a buddy to support the new team member is also a good practice. This buddy should be someone who can be trusted to listen to the newcomer's concerns but to keep those to themselves and to provide support and constructive feedback to help with the integration process.

But underlying all of this is psychological safety. If the leader and the team are unwilling to extend Inclusion and later, Learner safety, the team won't benefit from the uniqueness of the new team member.

B.A. Baracus might have called "Howling Mad" Murdock a "crazy fool" in episodes of the 1980's TV show, the A-Team, but he and the others respected his role within the team and effectively benefited from his "mad" skills as a pilot.

What are you doing to retain the Murdocks within your team?

In 2014 I wrote an article about the benefits which diversity in team composition can bring to risk identification. With different backgrounds and experiences, team members will usually identify a richer set of risks than might be defined by a group with limited diversity. It is also recognized that diverse teams are usually more creative and can be more innovative.

But while attending an Agile20Reflect event yesterday where a fair amount of time was spent by the participants discussing the lack of diversity in the boards of some agile associations and in the hiring of agile roles within certain companies, it reminded me that just because we conceptually accept something doesn't mean we are great at putting it into action.

Inertia often trumps diversity when it comes to staffing teams.

In matrix contexts, PMs will be providing their skill requirements to people managers and while the PM might be considering the overall team makeup in the back of their minds, priority is often too heavily placed on getting someone with the best skills to complete the expected work. Functional managers are faced with fielding multiple parallel and often competing requests for talent, so adding diversity into search criteria might be seen as a nice-to-have requirement. Even if the PM is at a higher level of power or influence, they might be reluctant to push back on the staffing recommendations made by the functional managers purely on a lack of diversity.

In projectized situations, the PM has much greater control over who will be part of their team, but if they are facing pressure to meet aggressive dates, they might be inclined to build the team as quickly as possible which means that diversity again takes a back seat.

Diversity quotas are not an answer as such strategies are divisive by intent. Oversight helps, but nothing will replace the real commitment of a PM to building their team with diversity in mind.

Staffing is just the first step.

Opportunities provided by having greater team diversity are squandered if we don't incorporate inclusiveness into team culture. For example, a PM's attitude towards conflict will affect how successful they are with inclusiveness. If they are concerned about intellectual friction, a conflict-averse PM might prefer to let the louder voices within the team drown out the rest.

We need to start by baking inclusiveness into team working agreements and we need to model inclusive behavior in our interactions with the team. It could also be a topic of discussion during reflection events by having team members identify behaviors and actions which were inclusive and those which weren't.

It is not by accident that embracing diversity has been paired with psychological safety within the first promise of the Disciplined Agile mindset as the two go hand-in-hand. The more inclusive we are with the diversity in our teams, the safer our team members will feel. And the safer our team members feel, the more they will be inclined to respect and encourage opinions which are different than their own.

While checking my LinkedIn feed this morning, I saw an update indicating that there are over 2,000 job postings for remote project managers on just one North American employment site. While this is encouraging news for those who have been laid off due to the economic impacts of COVID-19, the number of job seekers has also increased dramatically over the past two months.

If you are looking for a new role, a job as a remote project manager is ideal given the current circumstances but without actual experience leading dispersed or distributed teams, how can you compete with other candidates?

This challenge is a good example of the difference between interests and positions.

If the recruiter or hiring manager is focused on a position of needing someone with recent, demonstrable remote project management experience, you will want them to reveal the specific interests they have. You might not have the former, but if you can make them feel confident that you can satisfy the latter then they might be willing to take a chance with you.

Here are three categories of interests they are likely to have:

Team 

• How will you engage and inspire remote team members?
• How will you go about forming a high performing team from a group of individuals when there won't be an opportunity bring them together?
• How will you surface and respond to conflict or performance concerns with remote team members?

Key stakeholders

• How will you keep me in the loop?
• How will you align key stakeholders towards a common set of project objectives?
• How will you influence or persuade remote stakeholders who wield significant power over the project?
• How will you ensure key stakeholders such as the customer or project sponsor remain engaged and are providing timely feedback?
• How will you ensure decisions are getting made in a timely manner?

Monitor & control

• How will you gain an accurate understanding of project status?
• How will you know if scope creep is happening and how will you deal with that?
• How will you manage issues when everyone is dispersed?
• How will you know if critical risks are about to be realized?

Depending on the context of the project you should be able to identify other specific concerns. Updating your resume and cover letters to include examples of how you addressed these in the past. During an interview, ask probing questions to understand what are the top pain points the interviews is are worried about and try to allay their fears by providing specific examples of how you have addressed these in the past.

Is this guaranteed to work?

Of course not, but the more you can do to help them realize that your past experience is relevant to their current needs, the greater your chances of getting a call back.

Good luck, keep calm and stay safe!

While the relative level of formal authority vested in a project manager is greater in project-oriented (formerly projectized) organization structures than in matrix ones, the downside of this authority is that the project manager will spend much more time on people management administrative activities such as performance evaluations, hiring and supporting their professional development. While this is important work, it doesn't directly relate to the management of their projects and they might perceive it as a distraction.

In addition, in those organizations which are purely project-oriented (i.e. everything they do is project work with no functional or matrix structures to be found elsewhere within their walls), when projects end, if the team members who were contributing to them cannot be deployed to different projects then they may find themselves out of a job which is likely to stress their project managers even more at the very time when they are trying to line up other projects for themselves.

But there is a silver lining to this people management cloud.

Having these responsibilities will force the project manager to learn about the hopes, dreams and career aspirations of their direct reports. This should provide them with a greater ability to enable them to connect the team members' individual purposes to the success objectives of the project. They will also be better positioned to understand the competencies over which their staff wish to gain mastery which they can use to identify opportunities for personal development for these team members. Finally, even as project managers working in matrix structures will need to learn how to effective delegate, empowering their staff to work with autonomy is even more critical when there is a formal reporting relationship in place.

Project managers in project-oriented organizations might chafe at the additional responsibilities they have to shoulder, but these also give them more power to inspire their team members.