A Secret Weapon for Building Strong Teams

I am reading an excellent book called Unlock Behavior, Unleash Profits, by Dr. Leslie Braksick. The book talks about using behavioral science to bring about desired behaviors at the individual and organizational level. Correlating the content of the book with my professional experience in the PM field, I realized that most Project Managers miss out on a great opportunity to make their projects more successful by not taking advantage of the behavioral science.

In my career as a PM, I often see my fellow PMs focus on budgets, timelines, requirements management, scope management, issues logs, risks, and a million other things related to the project. I rarely see PMs focus on professional growth and development of their team members. In matrix organizations, team members don't report to the Project Manager, and PMs assume that professional growth and development of the team is not their responsiblity. Moreover, many feel they have little control over the team members' performance, since they hold neither the carrot nor the stick and thus can't adequately reward or punish the team members to optimize their behavior.

Fortunately, the behavioral science provides us with two mechanisms that don't rely on the ability to give or to take away tangible rewards. The mechanisms I am talking about are Feedback and Shaping.

For every behavior, there's an antecedent (a trigger) and a consequence. Feedback is one of the forms of consequences; it can re-enforce a desired behavior or lower the likelihood of an undesired behavior. Feedback doesn't cost money; you don't need to control a person's salary or bonus to give it. Yet, it can yield amazing results if done right.

While I would highly encourage you to read Chapter 5 of the book to get a comprehensive review of the feedback process, here's a quick summary of what constitutes effective feedback, in Dr. Braksick's view:

1. Make it specific. Don't just tell somebody they did great. Focus on details.

2. For every piece of constructive feedback, give 4 pieces of positive feedback. Remember, positive feedback re-enforces behaviors you appreciate. Constructive feedback is often aimed at stopping or changing behaviors you don't appreciate.

3. When providing constructive feedback, focus on the issue, not on the person.

4. Deliver feedback soon after the behavior occurs; otherwise, you may forget the details, and the person on the receiving end may have difficulty recalling the details of the behavior.

5. Be sincere. If you don't mean it, don't say it, as your tone of voice and your body language are likely to give you away, even as your words paint a different picture.

6. Give feedback often. It is free; it gives you the power to influence other people's behavior, and people will view you as a leader.

7. Avoid giving no feedback. No feedback is the worst option you can opt for. It neither re-enforce nor blocks a behavior, leaving the person guessing whether what they did was good or not.

8. Don't refrain from providing people with positive feedback. Remember how good you felt the last time someone gave you a specific and sincere praise? Make a day for other people by helping them feel noticed and cared for.


More in Shaping coming soon...

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.