Creating Team Connections

Success of a project manager largely depends on his ability to make the right connections with his team. A few years back, I had a project manager friend who was handling multiple projects – because of which he was not able to really focus on making connection with his team. Result was a decline in the team performance. My learnings from my friends experience are:

• It is imperative for a project manager to make a conscious effort on team building activities – facilitating effective positive communication, enabling mutual trust, respect, collaboration, fairness, commitment and openness. When these are enabled, team works for itself around a business objective and does what ever it takes to accomplish them. Teams become more accountable as a result of making effective and meaningful connections.
• It is equally crucial for the project manager to plan for time required in doing team building exercises. How can we expect a project manager to juggle with five projects and also do the team building activities? Managing more projects at the cost of people management is almost suicidal.

Lisa Haneberg writes a very impressive post on “Creating Connections” over at her blog “Management Craft“. The post starts with the following lines:

“Business is a contact sport and management is a social act. Until the robots take over, we need to get things done through people. And what that really means is that our relationships are the conduits for results. Think of a complicated telephone switch box with wires running to each home and then to the telephone company. Wires of different colors, some with stripes, some are hot, some ground the current. Wires everywhere making each conversation happen. If a wire gets kinked, cut, or corroded, the conversations stop. Your team is like that box and making sure you have each relationship wired and maintained is critical to ensuring the right conversations are able to occur.”

Read the full article.