Do you believe that it is our job as PMs to engage teams?

Yes 100%, it is PMs job to engage project team. Job of PM is to provide leadership to whole project team. He needs to provide assignment to team members to demonstrate their best ability and skills, find interest in job and further develop new skills. He is person to set right process for reward and recognition. This will not only help in fulfilling objective of project in hand but he is contributing to develop further organizational assets.

I pretty much concur with Akshay. Engagement, facilitation, partnerships - all extremely aspects of a PM's career. I would say that, in general, PM's have strong skills in relations (engagement, facilitation, partnerships).

Yes , its not only team but also stakeholders. PMBOK has processes for managing and controlling stakeholder engagements.

Its an essential skill on PM has to acquire to run the project , since project is done by people and nothing gets done well till people doing are engaged

I second the opinion of my fellow colleagues. One of the main PM's responsibilities is engaging teams and in my humble opinion, the PMBOK content helps with both building engagement and manageing their input, it definitely does.

Hi Ruth,

This is a great question. I've posted a few times on this forum and others the importance of project leaders, and the weakness that many organisational project management functions have - a heavy dependence on prescriptive methods. I agree with Akshay, the PM has a pivotal role in developing people and relationships, and team culture is a critical part of this role.

Project management is about people, and there are 3 things that a project manager must do to be successful:

1. Leadership - which means support, mentorship, guidance and direction. And its about respect, confidence and enthusiasm. Leadership is not telling someone what to do.
2. Culture - a great project leader creates a culture of achievement in the team. When I started building my most recent team, we had a workshop which I called "agreeing how we will behave". It was titled a little different to the standard corporate meeting title, and generated some interest. The purpose of the meeting was to create the rules of engagement and culture for the team. We all arrive in a project with preconcieved notions, and notions create unspoken assumptions and lead to poor outcomes. This workshop addresses and creates culture.
3. Methods - this is the way that the leadership, culture and 'work' gets done. In this, there are project management methods which suit the context (team, project, organisation).

When these three elements come together, the results are powerful. Oh, and the project objectives get delivered which of course is why we do what we do.