Inspiration and empowerment means unleashing the potential, strengths and creativity of your team to benefit your clients. You need to respond with speed to the changing demands of customers by providing high-value enterprise solutions that transform business, improve productivity and increase efficiencies.
At IBM, we try to inspire a strong collaborative culture. We pull together talents from different parts of our organization to maximize and accelerate knowledge sharing, skill level and strengthen relationships between our employees. Project management brings together team members from diverse backgrounds, areas of expertise, locations and cultures and empowers them to achieve one common goal: making the client's project a success.
Our experience has shown that teamwork among heterogeneous groups brings more creative solutions. Diversity inspires innovation and creativity and can be counted on to solve a problem and deliver on a customer obligation. We empower everyone to participate fully in creating business success, and we value IBMers for their distinctive skills, experiences and perspectives.
To empower your teams, understand the possible barriers to team building and take proactive steps to remove them. Unclear project objectives and roles/responsibilities, poor communication, unclear lines of command, a disorganized team structure, lack of project manager credibility, distance, poor team member involvement and commitment, and inappropriate selection of team members all can undermine the success of a project.
Project managers should, therefore, be prepared to look outside of their own department, business unit, immediate network or even country when they look to empower the best people to staff a customer project. Time zones or languages no longer should be a barrier in an era when IT and collaboration tools can facilitate cross-functional, global teamwork.
At IBM, we use an array of tools to inspire employee collaboration. Through our personalized intranet, IBMers open themselves up to their colleagues, making it easier for them to find the person with the right skills for the customer project. The forum also allows them to share information and tap into their business talent and expertise.