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Building Your Project Team
Building Your Project Team
By Arthur Cooper
(c) Copyright 2005
http://www.arthurcooper.com/
Suppose that you as a manager have been asked to form a team
for the life of a particular project. How should you set
about choosing your people and forming them into a well
functioning group?
Selecting your team.
Take care to choose the right people. Pick them for their
skills and abilities as they apply to your particular
project. You don’t necessarily need the person most
qualified in absolute terms, but you need the person most
qualified for your specific project. Concentrate on the
skills you need for the job in hand. Don’t be seduced by
reams of paper qualifications that you will never need.
You almost certainly need a mixture of team members each
with a different set of skills and abilities, rather than a
series of clones all with identical skills. Ensure that
taken as a group they together represent all the skills you
need in the proportions that you need them.
Don’t overlook the need to choose people who can all get
along with each other and work together as a team. A group
of prima donnas is the last thing you want.
Set the tone and the ground rules.
Do this at your very first team meeting. Make sure that you
call this at the very start of your project and that
everyone in your team comes to the meeting. Don’t be late
yourself and don’t allow lateness in others.
This is the meeting where you have to make it clear who is
in charge and what you expect from your team. This is where
the team hierarchies and reporting structures are restated.
This is the time to remove any ambiguities or potential
conflicts. Make sure everyone is clear about his role and
responsibilities. Delegate tasks as appropriate and make it
clear who hold the delegated authority.
Setting clear goals.
You must set clear achievable goals. You must set them for
your team as a whole and you must set them for the
individuals within your team. They must be unambiguous and
they must be mutually attainable. That is to say, no one
individual’s goal should in any way conflict with that of
another individual. In fact you want it to be in everybody’s
interest that each individual
achieves his own goal. Design
the goals accordingly. You must try to build a team that
works together with common aims, all working towards the
same final goal.
Achievable early goals.
Make use of your goals to build team spirit and enthusiasm.
Do this by setting small, easily-attainable goals early on
in your project while your team is still bedding-in and
settling down. Make them worthwhile goals, but goals that
you are almost certain can be reached. In this way your team
will notch up some early successes, which will certainly
boost morale and establish a sense of pride in the
achievement. Later goals that you set can (and should) be
more taxing and testing, but the early successes will do
wonders for the spirit of the team. This spirit will endure
long into the future as the going gets tougher.
Communication.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of
communication within any organisation, and in particular
within a work team. Make it your duty to ensure that
everyone within your team knows what is going on. Make sure
that everyone knows of outside events that will affect the
team. Make sure that everyone knows their own goals and
objectives and those of the team as a whole. Make sure they
know the objectives of those interfacing to them and of any
potential conflicts. Make sure that a problem or a delay in
one area is immediately communicated to those whom it may
affect.
Encourage and foster co-operation, not competition. Make
sure it is in no-one’s interest to keep information to
themselves. Communication will come naturally if it is in
everyone’s own interest – and this will be the case if you
have earlier ensured that you all have common mutually
interdependent goals.
These guidelines on their own are certainly not enough to
guarantee a fully functional and successful team, but
following them will go a long way towards creating one. On
the other hand, if you don’t follow them your chances of
success will be minimal.
About the Author
Arthur Cooper is a business consultant, writer and
publisher. For his mini-course 'Better Management' go to:
http://www.barrel-publishing.com/better_management.shtml
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