If you want to have a great project team then focus on having a great project team.
You can learn about how to have a great project team maybe from a book or a senior colleague but the best way to truly learn it is to start building one.
Focus on learning by doing. Read on for some tips on the same and start building a great team.
- Have A-grade or potentially A-grade people in your team. Also, make sure they’re coachable. If not, they should not be on our team.
- Consider attitude first, skills second. Consider this analogy: Skill is just like an important software while attitude is like an operating system. If you don’t have a reliable operating system, how can you expect your important software to be reliable?
- Make sure that your people focus on the ONE thing at a time – inspire them to become world-class in whatever ONE thing they work on. Multitasking is an excellence killer.
- Mentor, coach, train and raise your people because the quality of your project is proportionate to perceptions of your project team and the perception of your project team is greatly impacted by the personal growth of your people.
- Take care of people and they’ll take care of your project (and the business at large).
- Make sure your BEST team member works on the MOST valuable part of the project.
- Inspire them to take massive actions and fail fast. Deliver often. Get feedback on their work. let them learn from mistakes. And, get it repeated what they do best.
- Perfection is a myth; what matters is excellence. Excellence comes only when they do something excellent…and to do something excellent it is very important that they do ‘something’ and then seek to understand client’s feedback on whatever they’ve done. Then empower them to improve in whatever areas they need to.
- Connect your team with a deep sense of purpose. For example, if you’re building software for doctors; make them aware that what they are building is going to help save thousands of lives. It is more motivating than ”I’m building a data-form to capture some patient data.”
- Inspire them to start small, deliver early; deliver often. Inspect and adapt.
Power Questions:
- Do you have a great project team?
- If not, then what’s is it that you’re doing to make it great?
- If yes, then how can you make it greater?
