Stay Late, Earn Respect, Build the Team

I recently joined a PMI Certified PMPs group on LinkedIn and couldn't help jumping on a discussion regarding team building exercises. Are they useful or not?

My response was:

"Folks, the best team exercise is the one when you have a deadline, and you stick around in the office with the team even though they are doing all the work, and you are just sticking around to instill the team spirit. A good Project Manager is a leader who leads by example; you have the power to make an impact, and you don't need artificial exercises for it.

On a side note, I play Halo with my developers, I go to lunch with my testers, and I fight for my team in front of the clients. That's what helps me turn people I work with into cohesive teams."

I'd like to elaborate on this a little bit and give you a specific example of earning respect through this.

I recently delivered a project with an absolutely insane timeline - a public-facing web site with a potential audiences of hundreds of thousands. We did it on time and on budget, in 4 weeks. As you can guess, there were some late nights for the team, and that was expected (but not planned for!). As the project started, my Dev Lead asked me if I was the kind of a Project Manager who stays late with the troops until the job is done or goes home. My answer was, dude, of course I'll stick around (I learned the importance of staying up with the team at my previous job from Peter Hammond, the owner and President of CyberSavvy. Thanks Peter!) So a week before the launch, the push actually came to shove, and I stayed in the office until 9 pm with the team. The next day my Dev Lead came by my desk in the morning and said that he appreciated me sticking around and added that if I hadn't, "he and I would've had to have a little chat".

Earn respect and build the team by being there with them. There are few things more discouraging to the team morale than a PM who goes home when the team is burning midnight oil.