Coach project teams to mastery--build skills for excellence!

Abstract

Project managers are under tremendous pressure to deliver results in excruciatingly short periods of time. Abundant opportunity exists for us, as project managers to harm ourselves and others. Risk is rampant—every project day brings new traps for failure. Deadlines can make us not only careless with people and but also to care less for people. Amazingly, project leaders with energized teams magically wrestle success from the crocodile jaws of failure. For this reason, we must hear, learn, and apply lessons of success used every day to coach project teams to excellent project delivery.

Invigorate the “people side” of your projects—customers, sponsors, champions, stakeholders, and team members. Integrate people planning into project plans to forge resilient and agile teams to meet customer demands. Hear how to measure excellence in project teams. Amplify your team's impact to deliver successful project results. Diagnose deviation, then improve project performance and intervene using the proper tool. Challenge performance deviation; teach knowledge; guide technical and team skills; mentor social and political skills; steward individual and team success; and sanction failure. Be a project master: Produce results for people and with people, even under the most difficult conditions.

Introduction

Project managers have wonderful opportunities to achieve greatness. Projects are the greatest single development experience found by the Center for Creative Leadership. Being great requires leading vision and values, managing risk and resources, coaching individuals and teams, controlling time and progress. There is no tougher work. We fail to understand the devastation that time pressures put on project managers, team members, and the team itself. Deadlines can make us careless with people and to care less_for people. We may make internal decisions to be abrupt, short, and closed to individuals and numb to the needs of the project team. Yet with just a little sensitivity, we can energize teams to magically wrestle success from the crocodile jaws of failure. Let's explore how to coach teams and individuals to greater project performance and to achieve remarkable results even in the worst of times.

Exercise One – Evaluate the following personal project leader skills:

img   lead vision and values

img   manage risk and resources

img   coach individuals and teams

img   control time and progress

Rate these using the following five-point scale:

5 - Exceptional performance

4 – Good performance

3 – Satisfactory performance

2 - Needs improvement

1 - Needs a great deal of improvement

Exhibit 1: Project Opportunities for Coaching and Improving – change the dynamics of delivering a project

Project Opportunities for Coaching and Improving – change the dynamics of delivering a project

Coach What?

There are at least seven opportunities in a project to coach and improve. We must do each one well to create great teams and to deliver incredible projects. Exhibit 1 lists project work first. This is the work of doing the work. A project moves through a number of process stages from start-up to closure. Each stage must be prepared and carefully executed. What many project managers miss, however, is leading the team as well as the work of managing the project. The more the team knows about leading and managing the project, the greater responsibility they can assume for leading and managing the project. We will describe teamwork and coaching work later.

Exhibit 2: Forge Resilient and Agile Project Teams

Forge Resilient and Agile Project Teams

Forge Project Teams

Coaching alone does not make great project teams. First use the “Seven C's” approach (Exhibit 2) to forge resilient and agile project teams. As a project kickoff, ask people to discuss their hopes and fears for this project. Ask them to list their goals for themselves in the project: what they want to learn, what they want to do better, and at what they want to be great. Be selfish. One of the roles of the project manger is to help individuals achieve those personal goals. If goals are overt, people on the team can help each other achieve their goals. This helps the team to bond, to cohere. Exhibit 2 reviews each action for forging phenomenal project teams. We believe that the team needs to formally commit to their personal goals and to team goals for each specific project. You cannot overcommunicate but you can undercommunicate. The team needs to plan what to communicate, when, and by whom. The team can look for ways to celebrate and recognize good performance. There needs to be unstructured time (e.g., “a social hour”) to get to know each other and to work out glitches.

Exercise Two – Evaluate Teams

Score your project teams on how well they accomplish each “C” listed in Exhibit 2.

Use same five-point scale as described in Exercise One.

Team Performance

Teams need to stop and look at each action necessary for great team performance (these are listed in Exhibit 3). These actions need to be in place for a team to do the project work, to lead projects, to manage projects, and to move a project through the project process. Before start-up, the project team should look at this list, rate themselves, and coach each other, as well as ask for coaching. Excellence is the only standard. The team must do everything needed to be outstanding at their work.

Exercise Three – Evaluate Team Actions

Score your project teams as to how well they accomplish each of the nine team actions listed in Exhibit 3.

Use same five-point scale as described in Exercise One.

Exhibit 3: Project team performance – the “people side” of projects.

Project team performance – the “people side” of projects

Coaching: A Dialogue

Coaches come in many sizes, shapes, and genders. Coaches provide the wisdom and guidance to grow an individual and teams from advanced skill levels to mastery. “Yoda” (of “Star Wars” fame) was a coach. Individuals begin as apprentices and move on to become journeymen. Some can move beyond this level to that of master, then, finally, to mentor status. Coaches challenge, teach, guide, mentor, steward, and sanction. Both the context and content of the coach are different from those of a leader. The leader focuses on bringing apprentices to the journeyman level. The leader will always have a superior/subordinate relationship with the other project team members. However, the leader can choose to coach individuals on the project. Coaching is one of the skills of leaders who live strategically—believing that tomorrow is more important than today.

Coaches develop people as individuals and as teams: for the next project, for the benefit of that individual, for the benefit of the team, for the benefit of the organization. Coaches are in the business of raising people—nurturing, growing, cultivating, and pruning. Leaders tend to look at this project and at the next. Leaders work on processes, on vision, on values. Managers are “this-project-oriented.” Managers work on performance in this project—on the resources and on the results of now!

Leaders work on the 5% of all the items out there that generate 50% of the success.
Coaches work on the 20% of the items that generate 80% of the success.

Coaching tends to be informal, given at moments of readiness. We suggest that you make this coaching behavior more intentional. Coaches and players can both evaluate needs and contract for joint effort at improving. Tiger Woods has several coaches. A coach will teach—usually not basic skills, but additional knowledge. Coaches teach learning to learn, to grow, to be self-developing, to be reflective. Coaches improve and extend the 20% of the skills required for mastery. They teach by examining experience, by questioning, and by review. What lessons can we learn from this and how can we do this better?

Teams can be coached—to work as a team to be greater than simply a “gaggle” of individuals. Organizations can be coached, to grow to become high-performing, highly motivating, and continuously renewing. Look at NBA coaches! Larry Bird, Jerry Sloan, and Phil Jackson are superb examples. They challenge, teach, train, coach, mentor, steward, and sanction to build powerful teams. They share expectations, but they also share potential. They have line responsibility, but they develop superior players into extraordinary players. Then they take extraordinary players and mix them with ordinary players to make great teams. Look at their styles to see coaches in action.

Great leaders are great organizational coaches. Mentoring works on the “people side” of project performance. Coaches mentor their people on what it takes to satisfy clients, keeping the workers motivated, and sensing personal issues. Mentoring is about the heart, the emotions ofoneself and others. Importantly, mentoring is about how to influence others' emotions and perceptions as well as one's own.

Coaches must challenge. A coach can see the potential in the picture. A coach helps individuals become extraordinary. Coaching bonds are not present without challenging poor or ordinary performance. Nevertheless, providing challenge can be more of a matter of a “friend-helping-a friend” search for solutions. It is also a friend pointing out the existence of a problem long before it becomes a performance issue—a friend helping find a solution before it is needed. Consequences need to be mentioned; effective challenging includes a “wake-up” call, a clear and concise definition of a problem, real or potential.

Exhibit 4: Skills for Project Coaching

Skills for Project Coaching

Coaches steward. Some would say that they sustain. A coach, as a steward, is an advocate for the individual and/or team inside the organization.

Stewarding, however, is directed to developing the person and the team rather than to getting the choice assignments or acting beneficially for them. Stewards provide the platform to allow the person to risk growing. Sustaining provides courage and the protection needed for growth. Coaches sanction. If no development, change, growth, or effort takes place, a coach / leader must sanction the stagnation. Robert Montgomery Knight is the icon of sanctioning. If stagnation continues, the coach must prepare to cut the person loose. If the person is not receptive, then coaching is no longer beneficial. If the organization does not make progress towards a strategic initiative, it is not important to the organization, and the initiative should be dropped. This will only happen if the organization is sanctioned

Coaches make people and teams great. They move people beyond accomplishing the day-to-day activities of completing projects. A coach does more than show the ropes. A coach identifies the vines that swing the farthest and the highest and teaches people to find them on their own. Coach Individuals and Teams

As you juggle time, cost, quality of the project, you have to be coaching and improving individual and team performance. This takes the coaching skills listed in Exhibit 4. A project master can flip from one skill to the next within seconds depending on the needs of the individuals or the team. We say that too easily. The first skill is observation where seeing, recognizing, gauging impact all must take place in a microsecond. Next, is challenging the deviation. This is a face to face situation to collaboratively design coaching interventions that return performance to that expected. Guiding deals with tangible individual and team performance. Mentoring is much more sensitive. As a project leader you mentor individuals and teams on intrapersonal and interpersonal emotional awareness (being sensitive to self and others). You mentor how to influence, how to change, personal feelings and the feelings of others. We will explore Challenging Deviations later.

Exercise Four – Evaluate Coaching Skills

Score yourself on your ability to do each of the coaching skills listed in Exhibit 4.

Use the five-point scale described in Exercise One.

Performance Analysis

To improve your personal coaching skills, employ the 12-question Performance Analysis detailed in Exhibit 5 to develop the situation and to ensure the performance should be challenged. This is homework before any challenge. It will better prepare you as a coach and it will ensure that the issue is one that can be resolved by coaching.

Exercise Five: Mental Role Play

Step One: Given a Scenario

Step Two: Walk through performance analysis

Team Member #1 has delivered their part of the project late on two occasions. You have learned that the individual is not motivated to do much of anything. He or she views the membership on this team to be a demotion to a spur track. They need help understanding how this project can be beneficial to them. What is the cause of this performance and how do you ensure that this person is on the team and performing?

Challenge Performance: A Collaborative Process

All coaching begins with challenging the current performance. Coaching to be effective must respect the individual or the team being coached. Improvement can be dramatic with both the person and the team becoming extraordinary at their work. This seven step Challenging process, the heart of coaching, is detailed in Exhibit 6. This is not an ‘in your face’ situation. Many project managers only use one type of intervention – that of yelling at a baseball umpire. Coaching must be targeted and accurate – as a rapier. If you are to be good at Coaching, you must be good at Challenging. It opens the dialogue; it assumes you are not seeing the whole picture; nor that you are all knowing; and it leads to a joint solution. We will spend our remaining time practicing this one coaching tool.

Exercise Six – Mental Role Play

Step One: Given a Scenario

Step Two: Walk through Collaborative Challenge

Team Member #2 has been argumentative in two project progress meetings. You have learned that he or she has sweated, and worked, and been pleasant to get the plum assignment of project manager. Yet the job was given instead to a newbie, a brand new kid half the age of Team Member #2. Team Member #2 knows more, has been around longer, and has done this type of project five times already. What is the cause of this argumentative behavior and how do you resolve the problem?

Exhibit 5: Project Performance Analysis

Project Performance Analysis Project Performance Analysis Project Performance Analysis

Exhibit 6: Collaborative Challenge—First in all Coaching

Collaborative Challenge—First in all Coaching Collaborative Challenge—First in all Coaching

Exercise Seven – Physical Role Play (Exhibit 7)

Team member #3 has worked hard, delivered on time or early, and is now asking for relief on the next deadline so they can take an unscheduled two week vacation. The project will complete two weeks after they return and there are key deliverables required from them during the time they will be gone. They have a wonderful opportunity to travel to Sierra Leone on a medical mission trip sponsored by their church. The country has been in a civil war for the past ten years and is just now stable enough for volunteer missionaries to work safely. He or she will be providing logistic support to the doctors and nurses as well as helping manage this trip. The opportunity as just evolved and it is important for them to improve project management skills and to contribute.

Exercise Eight – Physical Role Play (Exhibit 7)

Customer (you can develop additional information as to who, what, when, and where, but the why will be answered in the coaching session), has added new requirements once, and revised existing requirements once. The coach does not know the revision was simply that (the sales people had reviewed the first set of requirements and had cleaned them up) and that this is a normal way of doing business. The new requirements will make this a significantly better product than anything in the marketplace. The time requirements to deliver the product do not change. How do you win friends and influence the customer to be a team player and not continue to abuse the project? How do you coach the project team with respect to this opportunity?

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© 2009, Lee A. Peters, ProjectLEADER, inc
Originally published as a part of 2009 PMI Global Congress Proceedings – Orlando, Florida

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