The goal of this artifact is to provide a quick overview of lesson 4 of PMI Authorized PMP Exam Prep- Lead the Project Team. The purpose of this document is to provide opportunity to the course participants and enable learning anywhere anytime. The idea is to provide content that reinforces all the topics covered in the class on Saturday as part of the PMP course at Education Edge.
Lesson 4: Lead the Project Team
Lesson 4 -Lead the Project team, documents some of the best practices that the project manager and the team may consider while executing the project. It has 7 topics as listed below:
Topic A: Craft Your Leadership Skills
Topic B: Create a Collaborative Project Team Environment
Topic C: Empower the Team
Topic D: Support Team Member Performance
Topic E: Communicate and Collaborate with Stakeholders
Topic F: Train Team Members and Stakeholders
Topic G: Manage Conflict
Topic A: Craft Your Leadership Skills
Topic B: Create a Collaborative Project Team Environment
Topic C: Empower the Team
Topic D: Support Team Member Performance
Topic E: Communicate and Collaborate with Stakeholders
Topic F: Train Team Members and Stakeholders
Topic G: Manage Conflict
Lead the Project team- Topic A: Craft Your Leadership Style
Teams are made up of individuals with different skill sets, backgrounds, experiences and attitudes.Cohesive, collaborative teams typically are productive and effective. Leadership is a trait required of everyone on the project team. If you are the project manager or team lead, then you also need to lead on leadership!
Project professionals use interpersonal skills, including collaborative leadership, communication, an innovative mindset, for-purpose orientation and empathy. Teams with these skills can maintain influence with a variety of stakeholders — a critical component for making change.
General guidelines to develop leadership competencies are included here.
- Tailor your leadership style to the project.
- Use emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills to lead with empathy; be mindful of individual and team aims and working relationships.
- Cultural and diversity aspects are important elements to implementing effective leadership modes.
- But also look at more kinds of diversity, including differing motivations and working styles of individuals and groups, which can vary greatly based on their experiences, age, culture, job roles and many more influences.
Focus on creating a psychologically safe environment so that team members feel empowered — this takes transparency and fostering a sense of openness.
Communication and openness to learn from others builds trust and improves the optimal options to lead various team members and stakeholders.
Leadership Styles
- Different from skills, these are styles that leaders need to be able to use in different environments.
- You should know a few of these and learn the differences between them; but on the job, the foremost requirement is to be able to adapt and tailor your leadership style to the situation.
- You’ll need to factor in your own, the team’s and the organization’s experience with the type of project — e.g., is this a new kind of project, or a new development approach?
- Assess your team’s maturity—experience levels, team-working experience, personality types and combinations are all factors in determining the appropriate styles to employ.
- The governance structure of your organization will influence your leadership style. This reflects the influence of organizational culture.
- Finally, where are your team members located physically and how can you enable them to work at their very best under potentially challenging conditions.
| Style | Characteristic |
| Direct | Hierarchical, with project manager making all decisions |
| Consultative | Leader factors in opinions, but makes the decisions |
| Servant Leadership | Leader models desired behaviors |
| Consensus/ Collaborative | Team operates autonomously |
| Situational | Style changes to fit context and maturity/experience of team |
Servant Leadership
- This is a key concept – Service to the team through addressing needs and development of team members.
- Rather than manage projects and teams, trying to keep the project on plan and the team in line, servant leaders help teams develop and grow as a group and as individuals.
- Servant leaders facilitate the team’s work by providing coaching and training, remove blocks that impede work progress, either from people or processes, and focus on team accomplishments rather than team misfires. To help reflect this change in orientation, many organizations use the term project leader rather than project manager.
- Servant leadership means leading by supporting the team and addressing their needs. This style aims to understand the team’s needs and take action to enable the team to perform and deliver.
- Support the team with a conducive environment and lead with communication by removing distractions or roadblocks.
- You are working for the team; therefore, you must focus on their needs. Being a servant leader requires skills such as active listening, coaching, awareness, and facilitation.
Adopt a Growth Mindset
- Challenging the status quo can open new ideas and perspectives. Challenging the way things were done, or are being done at the present time, assures all involved that this is the best approach and the best product. It also breaks complacency and blind acceptance.
- Encouraging healthy skepticism on all aspects of the project and its vision helps stakeholders not overlook anything and assume too much.
- Introspection is an examination of one’s own mental and emotional state.
Team Building
- Team-building is critical to ensuring that the team functions in a cohesive manner, working together in the same direction.
- This aspect is a critical component of leading a successful team.
- Team-building activities unify. Working collaboratively toward a shared goal is a great way for team members to help each other reach a higher level of performance.
- Team-building activities are the specific functions or actions taken to help the team to develop into a mature, productive team. They can be formal or informal, brief or extended, and facilitated by the project manager or a group facilitator.
Virtual Team Member’s Engagement
- Managing engagement with virtual team members requires persistence and a focus on good team dynamics, especially transparency, accountability and active attention to effective communications.
- Teams communicate better face to face, and there is lots of evidence of the criticality of being able to assess body language and tone of voice to ensure that team members have bought into the approaches they are using together to solve problems.
- Use and adapt video conferencing tools
Virtual Team Best Practices
- Manage risk of “feeling isolated”
- Focus on shared commitments and team goals vs. individual accomplishments
- Instill a sense of shared commitment to the project:
- Start with the team charter
- Adopt behaviors to reinforce collaboration and promote visibility
- Enable teams to self-organize and be accountable for deliverables.
- Use appropriate tools such as shared calendars to plan meetings, coordinate feedback, and improve visibility to goals and activity status
Lead the Project team- Topic B: Create a Collaborative Project Team Environment
We just discussed leading the people in your project. Now let’s look at best practices for ensuring work can happen smoothly. This topic includes creating a structure for physical and virtual working, including workspace management, project artifact and document creation, and configuration management.
Where and how the team works:
- The environment and location of a project team are extremely important elements to leading and managing projects.
- Your team needs to be able to contribute everywhere and at any time.
- Setting up the physical environment supports the whole team engagement.
- If the team feels involved and engaged, their interactions will be more meaningful.
- Give people autonomy in their work so they are empowered to take initiative when they need to. Your KPIs will help you detect and monitor subpar performance easily.
Agile spaces for Hybrid environment
- Colocating all involved in a shared workspace fosters more informal and immediate collaboration and exchange of information.
- Ensure private spaces for those who need to work in solitude.
- Even the passive information that is absorbed from the surroundings — such as ad hoc discussions, side conversations, whiteboard drawings and physical body language have value.
- Being immersed in the team physically and mentally improves the team’s ability to work faster, more collaboratively, and in a more unified way.
- In agile projects, meaningful interaction is a core tenet. To encourage frequent, free-flowing interaction, the team structure and workspaces must be conducive.
- All of this applies to hybrid teams.
Storage and Artifacts management
Here are some good practices for storage and distribution of artifacts:
- Store artifacts in an accessible location for users.
- Use a storage and distribution system that matches the complexity of the project.
- Use cloud-based document storage and retrieval systems for larger projects, especially if team members are geographically distributed.
Tailor the artifacts
- The project manager and/or team selects and adapts the appropriate artifacts for use on their specific project, tailoring them to the unique need of the project.
- Not every process, input, tool, technique or output is required on every project.
- These lists can be considered “typical,” and not exclusive.
- Artifacts typical of predictive include project charters, change requests and baselines.
Standardize the Artifacts
As much as possible, you should try to standardize an approach to artifact management. These are some helpful guidelines that will help guide good practice.
- A simple method of producing and controlling documents is best.
- Organizations often have templates and style sheets to standardize communication.
- Use a structured process for reviewing and approving documents
- Discuss and implement version control and security
- Distribute documents in a timely manner
- Pre-built systems may include:
- Built-in version control
- Document checkout and check-in
- User-based document security
- Automatic email alerts for changes
Tailor the Artifacts
- The project manager and/or team selects and adapts the appropriate artifacts for use on their specific project, tailoring them to the unique need of the project.
- Not every process, input, tool, technique or output is required on every project.
- These lists can be considered “typical,” and not exclusive.
- Artifacts typical of predictive include project charters, change requests and baselines.
Configuration Management System
- Some projects use a configuration management system to track project artifacts and monitor and control changes to them.
- The configuration management plan describes how the information about the items of the project (and which items) will be recorded and updated so that the product, service, or result of the project remains consistent and/or operative.
Version Control
- Each time a file is updated, give it a new version number.
- Include a date/time stamp and the name of the user who made the changes, providing a digital “paper trail” of the document’s history.
- Use version control for important artifacts such as subsidiary project management plans, the scope and other documents.
Lead the Project team- Topic C: Empower the Team
As we’re shifting into empowering the team rather than leading it, place emphasis on recognizing team members as local domain experts, the project manager as servant leader, use of EI approaches to leadership, enabling effective communication.
“Great teams are about personalities not just skills”
- Empowerment, team unity and autonomy are characteristics of high-performing teams that should be cultivated in any project team.
- People contribute their best because they feel proud of their work and are empowered, by being given shared responsibility.
- The team needs to be empowered to make decisions collaboratively and in a timely manner. This increases the team’s responsibility to deliver a product with complete ownership.
- When challenges arise during the project, empowered teams act with a greater sense of responsibility.
- Encourage the team to foster team collaboration and decision-making. The team does not depend on heavy-handed discipline. The team must recognize the power and influence they possess. As an empowered, cohesive unit, they depend on each other to make decisions and solve problems to deliver desired value quickly.
In projects, the team is the most important component. Without a unified team, the project falls apart and project management becomes insufficient.
- Strive to shape a team with a healthy culture of working autonomy.
- Use a light management touch, and one that is appropriate to the situation. Any interference with the team is disruptive, and it can reduce the members’ motivation to work.
Psychological safety is a psychosocial condition, required for high-performing project teams.
Team members should be comfortable being themselves at work.
Healthy work settings:
- Embrace diversity
- Are built on trust and mutual respect
- Ensure ethical decision-making
- Psychological safety goes hand in hand with diversity. This is an agile team concept that is also useful in predictive team settings. Trust and mutual respect are essential to an empowered team.
- Quite simply, it means that team members should be comfortable being themselves in their work setting.
Empower your team by creating and maintaining a healthy work setting that embraces diversity of all kinds and is built on trust and mutual respect.
Uphold Team Charter and Ground Rules
- The team charter and ground rules should be reviewed and updated as needed on a periodic basis.
This checklist of questions will help ensure the ground rules are maintained throughout the project.
- When the project is in motion, the team should always have the ground rules close at hand.
- If the project context experiences change, the team charter or ground rules might need updating.
- Ideally, the team should go through the “forming” stage again whenever it changes, but this can happen quickly in dynamic projects!
- Finally, if a rule has been violated, the team needs to ensure the appropriate response depending on leadership and composition of the team, and coach that team member back into alignment.
- Disciplinary action is reserved for serious violations of ground rules.
Use Rewards and Recognition to empower the team
- A reward and recognition plan is a formalized way to reinforce performance or behavior. Reward and recognition plans are generally standardized throughout an organization and approved through corporate channels. The purpose is to motivate the team to perform well.
- Rewards can include monetary gifts, additional vacation time or other perks, company plaques or trophies, or small gifts. Although it is common for the terms “reward” and “recognition” to be used interchangeably, they are different.
- You can recognize a person without giving them a reward.
- However, you should never reward a person without recognizing them.
- Be transparent and fair when using rewards and recognition. People need to know how they can be achieved.
- Tailor the rewards and recognition. Not everyone is excited by the same reward.
- Also, when given too often, they can become expected rather than earned.
- Individual and team rewards and recognition can be used for motivation.
- Individual recognition and rewards can sometimes create unwanted competition or animosity among the team and should be monitored closely for negative effects.
Decision Making – Empower the team to Act
- Decision-making is a core function of all teams. They need to make decisions about activities, risks, estimates and many other challenges.
- Forming a team includes deciding how the team will make decisions together and how they will handle conflict resolution when disagreements arise.
- For example, it may be highly desirable to seek consensus, but the team may want to identify how they will respond when consensus can’t be reached.
- You can decide in advance to take the highest estimate in case of persistent disagreements.
- Voting is a way of factoring in a lot of input before making a decision. It also gives everyone on the team an equal voice and is therefore preferred in many contexts.
- In autocratic decision-making, one team member makes the decision for the group. Sometimes, such a method is required in cases of straightforward decisions that don’t require a lot of input.
- Teams can use multicriteria decision analysis to make decisions. This involves the use of systematic and analytical approaches to find a solution. It is less reliant on opinions than voting.
Display Task Accountability
- In predictive settings, tasks are assigned and, in that way, people are made accountable for completing specific work.
- In hybrid and adaptive teams, Kanban boards are typically used. Make sure that all team members have easy access to the board, so they can update their work activity on it. Some teams build their boards on office whiteboards and that works great, as long as the team sits in one room.
Lead the Project team- Topic D: Support Team Members Performance
Supported team members perform better and are motivated to do their best work. You’ll need strategies to maintain support for individuals on the whole team. These are mainly focused on emotional intelligence and communication.
Manage and Lead the Team
- Teams are typically more productive and driven when they have clear objectives to meet. Project managers can support the team by setting objectives collaboratively with the team.
- Project professionals collaborate to create joint objectives that are challenging, yet attainable.
- Objective setting can be conducted at the start of a project or phase, but is commonly done throughout the project life cycle, such as in an Iteration Planning session in which the team sets the targets and commitments for the upcoming time period.
Personality Tests
It’s useful to get a better understanding of personalities on the team. Some teams use personality tests and indicators to create more meaningful interactions.
- These can form a friendly team-building activity, if used appropriately
- They can be used as a way of obtaining behavioral predictors, but they are not absolute.
- Always seek permission and explain why you’re using
- Encourage them to achieve and aspire as professionals.
- Improve interactions and communication.
- Build trust
- Empower team members by aligning their strengths with knowledge-sharing or coaching roles.
- Big Five Personality Model (OCEAN)
- Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
- DISC
- Results-oriented — e.g., product testing
- Relationship-focused — e.g., communication leader, meeting facilitator
- Innovative and disruptive thinkers — e.g., agile software developer/team member
- Process and rule-followers — e.g., transcriber in meetings, prototype builder
- Pragmatic — e.g., archive project documents
Emotional Intelligence
- An important interpersonal skill of all project managers is Emotional Intelligence (EI). EI helps you understand your emotions and those of others to help minimize conflict. The notion of EI evolved in the 1990s and is now recognized as a key set of personal and interpersonal skills.
- The personal side includes self-awareness, self-regulation and motivation, whereas the interpersonal side comprises social skills and empathy.
- Self-awareness measures how well you know your own emotions in a variety of situations.
- Self-regulation defines how well you can control those emotions.
- Motivation describes your intrinsic reasons for achievement.
- Empathy is how well you read and understand the emotions of others.
- Social skills address how well you build relationships and rapport with others.
Empathy
Empathy is a critical emotional intelligence skill that profoundly affects your ability to relate to and establish a rapport with others. It expands vision and decision-making beyond the immediate circumstance and your individual priority.
- Having empathy helps us to help ourselves (inward) and to help our team (outward).
- How empathy helps individuals:
Understanding others
- Being of service to others based on their particular needs and emotions.
- Readily observing emotional cues and listening carefully.
- Displaying tact and appreciating or sharing others’ points of view.
Service orientation:
- Happily providing proper help.
- Understanding a customer’s point of view; serving as a faithful guide.
- Looking for strategies to increase consumers’ contentment and loyalty.
- Recognizing consumers’ needs and matching them to products or services.
Developing others – Empathetic teams make this a priority:
- Recognizing and rewarding the talents and achievements of others.
- Providing helpful criticism and determining people’s development needs.
- Coaching and mentoring, when appropriate, and providing tasks that stretch and nurture a person’s abilities.
Leveraging diversity:
- Appreciating various life philosophies and being conscious of group contrasts without judging.
- Viewing variety as favorable circumstances, establishing conditions where different types of groups can thrive.
- Showing consideration for and connecting with people from diverse groups.
- Objecting to discrimination and bigotry.
Political awareness:
- Understanding the political truths and realities of companies.
- Grasping the influences that determine opinions and behaviors of clients, consumers or rivals.
- Recognizing critical social systems.
- Correctly interpreting crucial power connections.
- To lead people towards having the desired social skill set, you need to motivate them.
- Motivation is the EI skill associated with your personal, internal abilities. It’s about raising your ambition to attain peak performance. Let’s review this while thinking about how to nurture and grow these factors in yourself and the team.
Motivation
Achievement/Drive
- Setting tough goals and taking chances.
- Driving hard to get results and satisfy, or exceed, aspirations and ideals.
- Discovering how to upgrade your capabilities.
- Striving to minimize uncertainty and discovering ways to improve.
Commitment
- Relying on your team’s core principles to make decisions.
- Realizing a benefit in a comprehensive quest (holistic participation).
- Gladly sacrificing to fulfill a substantial company goal.
- Enthusiastically searching for opportunities to help achieve the team’s mission.
Initiative
- Working toward goals beyond what’s essential or anticipated.
- Inspiring others through extraordinary, resourceful feats.
- Being prepared to grab opportunities.
Optimism
- Hoping to succeed instead of fearing failure.
- Seeing reversals as caused by controllable factors instead of a personal defect.
- Steadily working toward goals regardless of barriers and glitches.
Lead the Project team- Topic E: Communicate and Collaborate with Stakeholder
Information, relationships, progress — everything depends on successful communication. Let’s explore effective communication and collaboration with stakeholders.
Effective project leadership means establishing meaningful and collaborative relationships with all stakeholders.
Communications are both personal and strategic. As a project leader, you need to manage volumes of informal and formal conversations, emails, documents and so on. You also have to establish healthy, collaborative working relationships within the team and with stakeholders. The key to both is effective communication.
- Project managers spend a great deal of time communicating with stakeholders, so it is important to ensure the right information is getting to the right stakeholder so timely decisions can be made, issues addressed and expectations met.
- Effective project teams rely on healthy, active communication to enable collaborative learning.
Communication Management Plan
The communications management plan is a component of the project management plan and is used by project managers in predictive environments.
Here’s the full list of what’s included in the communication Management Plan
- Stakeholder communication requirements
- Information to be communicated (language, format, content and level of detail)
- Escalation processes
- Reason for communication
- Time frame and frequency of communication
- Receipt of acknowledgment or response, if required
- Sender
- Authorizing person, in case of confidential information
- Receivers (needs, requirements and expectations)
- Methods or technologies of communication (email, press releases, social media)
- Resources allocated for communication activities (time and budget)
- Method for updating/ refining the plan during the project
- Glossary of common project terminology
- Flow charts of project information, workflows with possible sequence of authorization, list of reports, meeting plans
- Constraints related to legislation or regulation, technology, organizational policies, etc.
- Guidelines and templates for project status meetings, project team meetings, emails, website and PMIS
Communication is all about Active Listening and Effective Feedback
- Active listening and performing feedback are critical communication techniques that every project team member should practice.
- Using active listening, the listener must focus attention on the message to the end, rather than trying to formulate the response prematurely. The receiver should confirm receipt and understanding of the message, often by restating or paraphrasing the message, or using body language, head nodding, etc.
- The most important aspect is to provide confirmation that the message sent was understood. That can be done through feedback.
How to effectively collaborate
- Effective collaboration builds trust between all parties.
- Open dialogue and meaningful communication optimize the understanding of the aims, as well as the expectations of the results and what needs to be done in order to realize those expectations.
- Everyone’s involvement and engagement in the project may fluctuate or remain constant. That level of engagement is evaluated and reevaluated throughout the project.
- Keeping discussions transparent ensures appropriate stakeholders are knowledgeable and expectations are set. Engagement also builds appreciation for others’ needs and constraints.
- Communication skills, interpersonal skills, feedback meeting management, among other management skills, are leveraged to maximize the feedback loop and engagement between stakeholders.
Collaboration Activities
- Stakeholders collaborate every day in a project. Some stakeholders may be engaged less frequently; for example, a project sponsor who gets updates monthly or a product owner who only engages with the development team three or four times during an iteration.
- The frequency of engagement is based on mutual needs and expectations. Nearly constant engagement among the core project team is common. Encouraging that regular collaboration can be supported by daily stand-up meetings and collocating teams near each other for more face-to-face communications.
- More infrequent collaboration can be supported by scheduled sessions such as milestone reviews, backlog refinement sessions, and project update meetings.
- Determining and optimizing collaboration activities is an ongoing team effort spearheaded by the project manager in predictive settings.
Lead the Project team- Topic F: Training Coaching and Mentoring
- It is important to foster a culture of sharing. As a project leader, you are consistently learning and teaching others in daily interactions and collaborations.
- Everyone can and should avail themselves of training, coaching and mentoring opportunities.
- These activities occur as part of projects as well as external to projects — for example, an individual’s professional development path.
- Agile coaches or scrum masters help teams to develop their agile practice and foster more effective and cohesive teams.
- There is a separate stakeholder training that is done at the end of the project as part of the transition plan — to prepare those stakeholders (normally not involved in the project effort) to utilize the results of the project.
Training, coaching, and mentoring are three activities related to knowledge sharing. Project management practitioners will engage in all three at some point in their careers.
- Training provides specialized skill building for individuals and the team. It can be formal or informal, on almost any topic from “soft” to technical skills.
- Coaching opportunities can be done in pairs or groups; they help put knowledge into practice over an extended period of collaboration.
- Mentoring is a long-term relationship between individuals, which aims to transfer skill sets and knowledge from the more experienced party to the less experienced party.
You don’t necessarily need an agile coach to learn adaptive methods. Self-organizing teams coach and mentor each other every day in their work. Taking a cue from them, here are a few more ways of sharing knowledge while working:
- Encourage self-organization and initiative.
- Facilitate opportunities for others to practice project management tasks.
- Coach individuals on how to contribute in other project roles.
- Coach an individual with tacit knowledge.
- Demonstrate desired skills and best practices every day.
Lead the Project team- Topic G: Manage Conflict
An extremely important part of project leadership is maintaining a peaceful, productive working environment. In this section, we learn how to deal with conflicts, so that when they arise, you can attend to them.
- Effective conflict management can lead to improved understanding, performance, and productivity.
- Conversely, ineffective or nonexistent conflict management can lead to destructive behavior, animosity, poor performance and reduced productivity, all of which are disruptive to teams and threaten successful completion of a project.
- Managing conflict is a responsibility of all stakeholders. The direction and handling of conflict are heavily influenced by the project manager.
As a servant leader, you assist in the removal of impediments or sources of conflict. In agile projects, the team lead facilitates conflict resolution sessions or the team is empowered to resolve conflicts as they best see fit.
Conflict Management is everyone’s responsibility
- Managing conflict is a responsibility of all stakeholders. The direction and handling of conflict is heavily influenced by the project manager.
- As a servant leader, you assist in the removal of impediments or sources of conflict.
- In agile projects, the team lead facilitates conflict resolution sessions, or the team is empowered to resolve conflicts as they best see fit.
Conflict as part of team culture
- Team members need to be able to exchange ideas and points of view about work.
- Disruptions to the status quo can lead to conflict or new opportunities, equally.
- The team would have previously collaborated to create ground rules, including how to address conflict.
- A psychologically safe team environment is essential.
How to handle conflict
- Focus on the issues, not individuals, to approach conflict situations.
- The team charter and ground rules should be instructional. Remind the parties involved in the conflict of them!
- In agile teams, refer to the ground rules or posted code of conduct.
There are six basic approaches for handling conflicts; each is effective in different circumstances:
- Smooth/Accommodate
- Withdraw/Avoid
- Compromise/Reconcile
- Force/Direct
- Collaborate/Problem Solve
- Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR): Arbitration and mediation
