Creating high performance project teams for strategic change
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Mar 2005
Effective execution of strategic change remains a holy grail for all organisations. Since most strategic change needs to happen across business units, the challenges of creating and managing cross functional project teams are very real in most organisations. A previous column explored some of the benefits of operating your organisation in a project centric manner because it increases your ability to execute change and because it enables collaboration across functional business areas.
But working in a project based environment remains challenging because you typically have team members accountable to more than one reporting line, have to create and disband project teams on the fly, and still have to do the day job in your functional business area. So what can you do to make working in this environment more successful?
Understanding emotional intelligence (EQ) is useful, because it can:
Improve the ability of people (including yourself!) to contribute to or lead cross-functional project teams.
Improve the ability of team members to communicate.
Increase the likelihood of the team developing into a high performing project team.
What is emotional intelligence?
Often organisations mistakenly focus only on intellectual intelligence – as though only technical ability mattered. Often intellectual intelligence, or IQ, is understood to mean the technical proficiency to execute the tasks within the business and is used as a key measure of potential performance in people. This is a very one dimensional view of the capability of people to operate successfully and contribute in the business environment, and it ignores the fact that that people need to interact and collaborate in order to achieve a success strategic change. Emotional intelligence provides a model for understanding how emotional maturity contributes to success because people are not always entirely rational thinkers. Emotions play a strong role in communication and the ability of people to be effective. There is a lot of literature on emotional intelligence, and Daniel Goleman's books provide an good entrée that is focused on business.
Emotional intelligence commonly comprises five elements:
Self awareness – understanding your own emotions and knowing your emotional responses to the behaviours and emotions of team members around you. Self awareness includes understanding your own preferences and desires. It enables self confidence.
Self management of your own emotions – enables you to exert control over the instinctive fight or flight responses that drive human behaviour when under threat, pressure or criticism. It enables you to gain a hold over impulses, and rather to take accountability and responsibility for your emotional state and your behaviour. This enables creation increased levels of trust and integrity within a team.
Motivating yourself – enables you to take the initiative and seek constant achievement (in the broader sense). It enables you to commit to a team and to remain positive or optimistic throughout the challenges of team work.
Empathy – enables you to recognise and understand emotions in others. Understanding other people's reactions to the team, today's crisis or yourself as the leader or as a participant can enable the team to find better common solutions rather than react simply to the emotional state of the project team. Strong empathy makes it more likely that team members will be developed, and that opportunities are sought to benefit from the diversity of the team.
Handling relationships – managing relationships with other people requires that you are able to adapt to and induce desirable responses in other team members. This allows you to wield influence on the team – but always with integrity. Managing your own and other people's emotions effectively makes you to an effective communicator and listener who is able to manage conflict and communicate convincing messages. Strong relationships will create a stronger team identity, which in turn will lead to increased teamwork and team effectiveness.
An important aspect of emotional intelligence is to recognise that each person on the team has their own mental model through which they see the world – resulting in the recognition that other people will not see the same reality as you. Managers sometimes see decisions and tasks in too much black and white, rather than recognising and understanding the differences between team member's points of view. This requires trust in the idea that team members are motivated by what they believe is good for the project, and that they are not participating with malice. This idea also lays the foundation for leadership which focused on the outcomes of the project team, instead of micro-managing the team members.
What else makes a high performing project team?
High performing team often reflect similar characteristics, and as a project leader you can try to instil these characteristics in the fabric of the team:
Strong mutual respect and trust that will enable open, honest communication.
A common and clear vision which creates a sense of purpose resulting in an excited and motivated team.
A team understanding of the trade offs and choices that are an inherent part of strategic change.
Clear goals and roles that make sure the team is doing the right things and that play to the strength of the diversity of the team members.
A focus on outcomes and achievement that comes from a sense of accountability and a commitment to the team. It is the results of the team that counts – not the results of each individual.
High performance project teams can successfully execute strategic change programs – even when some of the challenges seem insurmountable. Given the focus on execution in the government since the last election, establishing such teams and successfully executing strategic change programs should become a core competence of government ministries. The private sector is not much different – management companies need to undergo significant strategic change if they are to remain competitive in the global market place.. Creating teams that successfully implement strategic change requires sophisticated people skills – and an understanding of emotional intelligence can enable you to perform better as a team leader or as a participant in a high performing team.
Creating high performance project teams for strategic change was published as Strategym #24 in March 2005
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