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

Hi Rami
Thank you for your response! I find PMBOK helpful in showing us WHAT to in respect of engagement and interpersonal interactions, but I don't really see much about HOW to do it. Do you agree? How did you learn to engage people?

Hi Rami
Thank you for your response! I find PMBOK helpful in showing us WHAT to in respect of engagement and interpersonal interactions, but I don't really see much about HOW to do it. Do you agree? How did you learn to engage people?

Thank you Andrew.
Do you have some examples of things that you or project managers that you know do to build a sense of team membership and engagement?

Thank you so much for your insights!

Hi Ruth, our team ends up in the middle of various project initiatives, b/c we support several technologies groups throughout the organization use as a framework for their applications or business processes. That does not always mean we should be leading, supporting, or even working the effort.

That said, we have made it part of our internal process to understand the ask, and engage other groups, EA, VMO, Risk & Compliance, to ensure all due diligence is performed.

Those conversations are the engagement, facilitation, and partnerships I spoke of above. Maybe it is not exactly what you're were looking for when opening the discussion, but it was what had come to mind.

In my team, I'm both the BA and PM, responsible for this process. Actually, the process itself is a result of my work with leadership to improve how initiatives are vetted and either queued up in our pipeline, or deflected to the proper group.

At the end of the day, facilitating these conversations is part of my responsibilities and important to the organization as a whole to ensure new initiatives remain strategically aligned, and within the appropriate group(s).

All comments above are great. But I have a doubt that people leave their organization might not be directly connected with manager's capability to well engage them into the project activities.

There are lots of reasons why people leave their jobs and why engagement of employee is low.

One of critical reason is the organizational culture and structure. In my humble opinion, if the organization culture and structure is favorable to project manager and team members, project manager's role to well engage his or her team members is effective. It is also seen employees' perspective that if the organizational culture and structure is favorable to them, they won't leave their jobs easily even though their managers failed to well engage them into project activities. Their projects are temporary anyway and they are not bound by their project managers after their projects are completed.

Hi Ruth
The simple answer his yes it is the role of the PM to engage the team. It is how PMBOK present it. Already lots of excellent comments.
The PM need to engage not only the project team but also the corporate people that have impact on the projet.
The organisation culture and assets have a big impact on how easy or difficult it is gone be for the PM. It is specially true when the project get close to conclusion if the organisation has a reputation of laying off ressources at the end.

To go further the organisations that in recent years have not show much loyalty to their employe, leave the PM with a much difficult task.