“A round man cannot be expected to fit into a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.”
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) More Trumps Abroad, 1897.
I trust that it is self‐evident that one person is not a team. With two people in a project/work environment, it is likely that job titles, rank, or years of service will skew the relationship. With three people, there will always be the problem of two people against one. It is not until there are four people that the true dynamics of a team come into play. With four people, it is also possible to have all of Belbin's original eight team roles (see the following Section R) in existence within the group – if we take into account their secondary as well as their primary roles.
As is stated in Part IV Section D (paragraphs 1.1 to 1.5) and reiterated in Sections H, K, O, P, Q, and S of Part IV, get the right people. This is one of the most, if not the most, important thing you can do. In the same way that the client project manager is relying on you to make a success of the project, so you are only as good as the people who report to you. You are dependent upon your team. As Charlie Croaker (Michael Caine) says in the film The Italian Job, “This is a very difficult job, and the only way to get it done is that we all work together as a team, and that means you do everything I say!” You, the project manager, then have to provide the leadership and guidance to allow the team to deliver safely, on schedule, and at the lowest possible cost.
Ideally you may be able to select from a ready‐made team of people already working on a project that is coming to an end. However, you are more likely to have people allocated to you. In these circumstance,s team building will be even more important – see subsection 2.0 below.
As stated in Part VI, Section A, communication is the biggest problem in organizations. Projects are no different. Communication is a function of relationships; consequently, developing these relationships is essential. This is done through team building. You may be fortunate and be able to take your whole team away on an outdoor structured development programme of two or three days. This is not usually available, but you must do something if only in the canteen or training facility; if your company is far sighted enough to recognise the benefits of these facilities. At the very least, you can use a conference room.
1 Selecting the Team
1.1
If you are not able to select an existing team but have some choice (for example putting a team together for a proposal), then you will be spending many hours pouring over curriculum vitae (CVs).
1.2
Be wary of badly written CVs that are lists of jobs the individual has done or projects they have worked on. You want to see what they achieved as an individual or what was special about the projects.
1.3
Reject the CVs outright if the years of work experience divided by the number of projects is less than nine months. These people will never have had to live with the consequences of their decisions. They probably never started anything or finished anything. Good people will have worked on relatively few projects.
1.4
If you are fortunate, you will be able to lead the proposal effort for the project for which you will be the project manager (assuming you are successful). Doing the proposal with some of the proposed team members is an excellent team building exercise in its own right. You have an opportunity to see how people work together under pressure. You will also have an opportunity to see where there might be problems.
1.5
Talk to two or three trusted colleagues and sound them out on their views about an individual as well as their functional/line manager, not forgetting their most recent project manager.
1.6
Review their performance appraisal with the project manager who contributed to it.
1.7
Filter potential candidates by plotting qualifications (for the job/position/role) against experience (in the job/function/role). See Figure V.Q.1.
It should be obvious that you are not interested in the low – low candidates, and they should be rejected.
The highly qualified (expensive?) candidate but lacking experience should also be rejected. Let another project train them. Nevertheless, consider using them if they fall into the category of the next paragraph c.
Use some younger personnel. They will be highly motivated to get the right experience. As a bonus, their hourly rate will be less than budgeted. However, this will have to be balanced with checking of their work more.
The high – high person may look like an excellent candidate, but they will have a hidden agenda. They may play politics, using your project as a springboard to advance their career objectives and will leave when it suits them.
Your best candidate will be the one who is high in experience but is lacking in the qualifications category. For example, they have done all of the sub‐functions of the role but have never been ‘manager of’ the function. This person will work loyally to achieve project success. They want to put that title of manager or supervisor on their CV.
Paragraph 1.7e above provides an important clue to selecting team members find out something about their hidden agenda (everyone has one) that can be satisfied by working on your project.
1.9
Weight the characteristics required for the project for each position and score the CVs against the required profile. See the following example:
Characteristics/Score
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
General capability/flexibility
•
2
Competence in function
•
3
Facility/technology experience
•
4
Experience in location
•
5
Adaptability and stability
•
6
People consciousness
•
7
Cooperativeness
•
8
Cultural awareness
•
9
Language ability
•
The paper12 from which this concept is taken makes the point that ‘it is equally important to evaluate the capability of the resulting team.’ Further, ‘the importance of particular elements of capability for the particular project should be taken into account.’
For a home country project, it will probably not matter if characteristics 8 and 9 are low. However, for a project in a foreign location, you will need the number two in the discipline to be high in these areas to provide a balance of the characteristics needed. Similarly, some job functions may not require a high score for a particular characteristic. A procurement manager, for example, can have a low score with experience of the facility but would need a higher weighting for experience in the location.
Do not forget to evaluate yourself. As project manager, you might be low on your knowledge of the technology. In this case you will need to make sure that there is someone in the team whose capability you trust and respect to compensate for your own deficiency.
Do not be misled into thinking that a job title means competence.
Have a replacement strategy. So, keep some team candidates in reserve. You will need new people or replacements at some stage during the project.
1.10
Try selecting people with totally different backgrounds. A directly applicable example, for a role involving lifting heavy equipment, would be to use someone with a background in the royal engineers. On one‐of‐a‐kind projects, you will be able to choose people, who want a career challenge, to work on a once‐in‐a‐lifetime unique project. Developing the (new, not done before) systems for Eurotunnel did just this, using people with a whole mixture of different backgrounds.
1.11
Finally, look at people's hobbies, outside interests, and extra‐curricular activities. You may find some hidden gems of expertise.
1.12
Remember, you will have to be tough in making sure that you have chosen the right people:
A prince [project manager] must want to have a reputation for compassion rather than for cruelty: nonetheless, he must be careful that he does not make bad use of compassion.
A prince must not worry if he incurs reproach for his cruelty so long as he keeps his team united and loyal. By making an example or two he will prove more compassionate than those who, being too compassionate, allow disorders. These disorders nearly always harm the whole community, whereas executions ordered by a prince only affect individuals.13
2 Building the Team
Team building is necessary because:
Team members are unaware of how their contributions can affect the project.
The concept of teamwork is not well understood and may conflict with the culture of the organization and the experience of individuals.
Team members tend to cover up and solve their own problems – they resist systems, which expose problems.
Having done team building on live projects14 and having been involved in team building over a ten‐year period with students at the start of an MSc project management course, the following is my perspective of the key processes involved.
2.1
Team building is concerned with moving a diffident group of people through Tuckman's development cycle15 (see Figure V.Q.2) in order to produce a performing team with aligned objectives.
2.2
Your training manager should be familiar with this model and work with them to develop a programme. They should be delighted that someone wants to use their expertise to the full.
2.3
Your role, as project manager, is to lead the whole process. The training manager is there to act as a facilitator and to protect you from any ‘damage’. You should also agree between you when it is appropriate to let other project personnel take the lead, for example, the project controls manager leading the development of the critical path network.
2.4
The group will not become a team until it has moved through Tuckman's storming phase. This is where it is essential to use the expertise of the training manager. Getting through the storming phase can take years under normal circumstances. The challenge is how to do this reasonably quickly and in a controlled manner.
The development of the critical path network is one real project task that can generate a lot of emotion and is a good storming process.
2.5
Hold team building at a stage when the group is manageable. However, you need to avoid an ‘us’ and ‘them’ attitude. There will, therefore, be a need for a follow‐up session(s) later so as to involve latecomers to the team.
2.6
Team building should preferably be done off site and ideally in an outdoor development centre. An exercise involving constructing a raft to cross a river (preferably in the rain!) can bring out all the emotions and characteristics needed in team building. Other smaller physical problem‐solving exercises are useful to let a number of team supervisors experience different leadership styles.
2.6.1
Team building can take different forms. I once organized a coach trip, for non‐technical administrative staff to take them to a site in the United Kingdom. The idea was to help them understand that a six‐inch pipe was not their perceived small item but, with flanges and valves, was quite a chunky piece of metal.
2.6.2
As a bare minimum, a programme should be developed for use in an office conference room. There are good exercises involving design and construct projects with Lego bricks.
2.7
The process of team building is best illustrated by the Johari Window model16 (see Figure V.Q.3). The model should be viewed from both an individual perspective and a group perspective.
2.8
In Tuckman's forming phase, what is known about each other in the group is fairly limited, and there is reluctance for people to reveal anything about themselves. Similarly, they are unlikely to give you feedback on how you impact on them.
Exercises are needed that help the people reveal things about themselves and give and receive feedback illustrated in Figure V.Q.4. Revealing thoughts, attitudes, and personal information are important if the horizontal barrier between what is known within the group (the public domain) is to be moved downwards and so enlarge the knowledge of the group.
2.10
Similarly, getting feedback from people will move the vertical barrier to the right in order to reduce your blind spots and, again, enlarge the knowledge in the public domain about the group.
An essential revealing and feedback exercise is to complete a Belbin questionnaire (see the next Section R) and share the results with the group/team (see Figure V.R.1).
Plot the team's primary role (their highest score) and their secondary role (next highest score) onto the various segments of the Figure V.R.1 diagram on a flip chart. This process is a low‐risk part of the revealing process mentioned above.
Discuss and decide who might have to modify their behaviour in order to achieve a more balanced team. If you have too many characteristics that are the same (particularly shapers) in a group, the group will never achieve anything.
Another very effective revealing and feedback exercise is to get the individual members of the group to draw (on individual flip chart sheets) how they see themselves and their role within the team. A variant of this is how they view the project or how they see the project in the context of the company. People will draw pictures of issues that they would not otherwise reveal.
Figure V.Q.4 This exercise is best carried out after dinner and a visit to the bar. Castles, bow and arrows, and daggers in the back are very interesting to have explained.
Get the training manager to come up with a variety of exercises involving creativity, problem‐solving and different management styles. Let different supervisors lead different exercises.
2.11
There are a number of topics that should form part of the team‐building agenda that are real work project issues that need to be resolved. For example:
Developing a project motivating phrase
Agreeing the communication mechanisms
Developing the product and work breakdown structure
Developing the proposal risk analysis
Planning the project and developing the network
Producing a mission statement for the project
Review of lessons learned from previous projects
Improving execution methods using VM and VE. See Section S.
3 New to the Team
3.1
If you are a project manager who is new to an established team, or if there is a new senior member of the team, a different approach is needed. Hold a series of one‐to‐one interviews with the direct reports. If you are the new project manager, you then need to make a presentation to the whole team on yourself and your expectations.
