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How to be a Successful Project Team Leader

Guest post by: Roger Ingbretsen

Article Overview: The project leader is a facilitator whose role is to create and maintain a safe environment where people can learn, discover their strengths and weaknesses and relate to others authentically. Practices such as listening, promoting open-mindedness, actively seeking feedback, open sharing of ideas and viewing healthy conflict as an opportunity for growth, should be embedded in the group's culture.

How to be a Successful Project Team Leader

To be successful, a project team leader must be able to cope with significant ambiguity. As an aide to coping with uncertainties, the leader must develop a vision or mental model of how the project looks from the 10,000-foot level. They need to see the whole playing field; the entire interconnected interdependent picture. The leader must then use this big picture view to develop a visual and verbal picture of how the project team environment will work and what they are aiming to achieve. As project leaders, we can best involve team members by encouraging the team to be self-organizing. This allows members of the team to discover their own challenges. The role of the leader is to create an atmosphere wherein team members can coalesce spontaneously.

The project leader needs to give them a problem or objective and provide whatever support they need. A leader can tell on innovative project team what to do but can’t effectively tell them how to do it. As an example, the project team leader could say “We are working in a skunk works environment, with little outside support. This effort will require a great dependence on collaborative teamwork, and individual responsiveness to the accomplishment of the goal of X product release on X date.” The above thought process would be a mental model that could be expressed to the project team. This basically says to the team, be creative, you’re on our own and must depend on each other and take care of and teach each other in order to be successful and achieve the goal. Stated another way, “You’re a community of people who are in this together and are in charge of your own destiny.”

The project leader is a facilitator whose role is to create and maintain a safe environment where people can learn, discover their strengths and weaknesses and relate to others authentically. Practices such as listening, promoting open-mindedness, actively seeking feedback, open sharing of ideas and viewing healthy conflict as an opportunity for growth, should be embedded in the group's culture. Inquiry, continuous learning, mutual trust and a sense of collective ownership are the types of behavior the leader must facilitate on a continuous basis. All of the above will allow and encourage people to venture out of their comfort zones and take the kinds of risks required to deal with change and become more adaptive within a complex team work environment. The project leader who demonstrates this type of leadership will help bring meaning to the project and gain commitment from the team.

I strongly believe the ultimate litmus test of successful project leadership in the information age is the leaders’ ability to clearly translate the intention of the project into reality and then sustain it through continual engagement of all stakeholders. Sustainability has become a major criterion for evaluating the health of a project team. Adaptability and excellence are definitely necessary; but the fitness of the team to work together effectively in our now networked society, translates into “sustainability.” A sustainable project team is the one that is continually dealing with the details and the future. Sustainability captures the quality of endurance, adaptability and excellence over time.

A high level of engagement to support sustainability will be based on whether people’s needs are being served and the intellectual goals of the team are being fulfilled. Are the needs of the team members being taken care of? This caring leadership is not about operating within the comfort zone of the follower. Caring leadership is best defined as providing the environment, which enables the team to best obtain the desired end results. This is done through the caring inspirational engagement of the follower. To inspire means “to breathe life into.”

The capacity of leaders to create the social architecture capable of generating intellectual capital for the overall good of the team and its members is also key. Intellectual capital is deeply imbedded in human capital; therefore, it is much more complex and difficult to quantify than all other forms of capital. It is personal, requiring a much different level of engagement. Quantifying intellectual capital is an attempt to measure the knowledge and skills – both formal and informal – of a team or person. This measurement applies not only to their present role but also to potential future roles. It is really an inventory of potential, which can be seen as having impact and adding value to the team so it can produce the required outcome of the project.

The role of the project team leader is to assemble the best talent, provide a clear picture and understanding of the objective and then provide and nurture an environment where people can perform at their highest level.

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Article Tags: project leader, project team leader, successful project leader



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