Team Members Commitment and Project Management

Hello Luis: The impact of team commitment on Project Outcomes and Project Management is enormous. The percentages you shared are staggering. If the team was responsible for emptying a garage and everyone was 100% committed, the work would get done quickly and efficiently. But if only 13% of the team were committed to doing the work, it would take much longer and there would be all kinds of influences and poor behaviors to deal with. Our role as the project manager is to influence and inspire the team to increase commitment from 13% to 100%. So many different things come to mind, but team building becomes important for success. Clear communication with the details team members need to understand the project tasks can move team members closer to full commitment. It also helps if they have trust in us as project managers. If the team already knows you this is easy, but if you are walking into a new team, this can be harder initially. Kiron is right about having strong and trusted relationships already built with functional managers, but sometimes we walk in brand new without that history yet. Kiron was exactly right in his 3C's approach. It takes all 3 of those things to be successful. If it was me, I would brainstorm ways to focus on and reach out to the 63% non-committed team members to help encourage them to move through the stages of change and become committed believers. Then I would work to bring over the unengaged 24%. Luis, I know you will ask me how.....so, these are a few things I would try: (1) Individually find out from each team member how successful they think the project will be and how important they believe their role in project is. (2) From this, I would work to address all concerns and seek to validate each person's important role on the team (3) I would look for ways to incorporate joy into the work and make sure each team members is supported and clearly communicated with about any changes or details needed to do their best work - working diligently to eliminate barriers or obstacles and creating ways to measure individual and team success - these things will increase the energy about reaching milestones and ultimate project success.

Luis

Team commitment is vital for project success, and although the PM can control any issues to a certain extent, yet, it won’t be as ideal as having a team commitment and buy-in. It builds a culture of trust and maturity in the organization.

To achieve high level of commitment, I guess the team has to have a certain comfort level and motivation (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs).

RK

Luis,

This is a very interesting question. From my experience, commitment of team members can make or break a project and can stress or loosen the following knowledge areas: Project Stakeholder Management, Project Resource Management, and Project Communications Management.

Project management is an art as well as a science that's why it's the responsibility of the project manager to engage stakeholders and team members via motivating the team members to "commit" through team building activities, emotional intelligence, etc.

Having a highly committed team is not an easy task. Because loyalty can be influenced by the structure of the organisation, organisational culture, buy-in of team members of the project, existing policies, processes, and procedures. Bending and tailoring these influences for the team may be impossible in some or most organisations.

Zaid

I wrote an article three years ago which said that successful teams were made of folks that had the 3 C's: capability, capacity & commitment.

A gap in any one of those will result in inferior outcomes.

However, as PMs we have significant influence over this even if the team members don't report to us. Whether you buy into Lencioni's Three Signs of a Miserable Job or the three drivers of intrinsic motivation from Daniel Pink's Drive, we can help to boost commitment in many cases.

Kiron

Interesting...I also use a "Three C's" approach, but from a team perspective not individual levels of capability, capacity, and commitment.

My three are Collaboration, Cooperation, and Communication. I find that a team founded on these can overcome individual challenges; collaboration builds capability across the team, cooperation improves overall capacity, and communication helps keep everyone committed to the end goals.

Since I have never had direct reports and all my teams have been matrixed in to me with "dotted line" reporting structures I tend to focus at the team level C's and work with the resource manager(s) to identify and clear roadblocks based on the individual C's either through performance goals, coaching, or mentoring.

That’s actually quite shocking so definitely an eye-opener for the community, Luis super discussion thanks for bringing up this topic. Combination of Kiron’s and Scott’s means there would be 6 C’s which I felt they are all important to avoid dysfunctional team.

Dear Kiron
Thank you for your opinion

Add outsourcing to team member services and increase complexity ... is the result even less compromised?

Luis -

can you clarify your question? Are you asking if outsourced team members are added to the mix whether things get more challenging? If so, definitely!

Kiron