Newsletter Volume 3 No.1

Volume 3, No. 1

“Helping You Accelerate Your High-Tech Development Projects”

Welcome to the ANGOTTI PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT e-mail newsletter!

The goal of this newsletter is to help you accelerate your development projects by sharing some of the many tips, techniques and strategies we’ve honed during two decades of providing high-tech consulting services.

This issue, Part 2 of 2, discusses the areas of project team support that significantly helps teams to create a speedy and effective execution of the project plan. Without general management and project level support, a project is doomed to fail.

RECAP OF PART 1

The last newsletter contained Part 1 of this two part series on providing support for project team members. It described support
as being very personal in nature. It also discussed that learning this skill grows out of the experience of the manager and several basic concepts.

Part 1 focused mostly on the leadership and motivational skills needed to support a team. This article continues by covering a few other “soft” skills that are needed to provide support. It focuses on the other skills of Coaching and Communicating and the closely related skill of Negotiating. In many ways, these skills are very closely aligned and difficult to separate.

COACHING

Most effective project managers of complex projects have learned the ability to coach, rather than overly direct the team. The
team directs its own activities. This approach can be a style foreign to many engineers, but it can be critical in effectively achieving overall project goals. Such group coaching is a cross between brainstorming, mediation, meeting facilitation and “serial individual coaching” that is often centered on specific issues.

Implicit in the concept of Coaching is that the team being coached agrees that they wish to be coached. This starts out with
a mutually developed strong team goal, and a desire to achieve it. The coach then interacts with the team to help the team get the maximum performance from everyone.

Sometimes, while coaching a team, the project manager may not even be explicitly requested by the team to coach them. The
“request” for coaching is more “implicit” than “explicit”. It involves a part of an ongoing conversation with the project
manager’s role as a facilitator. Doing this adroitly is another part of the required “soft” skills needed by a Project Manager to
coach a team.

COACHING IS PROACTIVE

Coaching a team is accomplished by having the coach interact with the entire team or specific team members within the setting of a
team meeting or a set of project goals. Depending on the circumstances, coaching can also be done directly one-on-one in
private. These requirements add further to the skill required to be an effective PM coach. Done ineffectively, the result may create more team dysfunction or create more project problems. Again, care should be taken to learn this very complex skill before attempting to use it. These skills are definitely learned only with a combination of education, training and experience.

MY FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH COACHING

The first personal experience I had with Coaching was via a coach I had in Little League Baseball as a young boy. This person
believed in what might be called the “toughlove” approach to coaching. Most of the coaching consisted of demonstrating how to do something and yelling angrily at the team members when they made mistakes.

The coach often made use of public humiliations and threats to motivate people to do better. He likely meant well, but his
results were mixed among the team members. I got very little out of his “coaching”. The team members accepted his methods because many parents use this style, so it was familiar to them. They also accepted this style because they really wanted to be “on the team” and “play in the game”. This coach had a “my way, or the highway” approach to leading the team to victory. The result was that I have had a negative connotation to the term “Coach” until only a few years back when I met several professional, high performance, coaches that would never use this approach to help a team achieve its goals.

In practice, I have met a number of managers and team leaders that have employed the “toughlove” approach to managing project teams. Sometimes it appears effective, but most high tech teams would not tolerate such behavior for long. Even so, it is surprising how many managers still try to use this method to coax maximum performance from a team. The majority of team leaders and professional coaches today use much less negative approaches to get maximum performance.

COACHING SKILLS

Coaching requires a complex cluster set of several skills to be effective. Two significant ones are listening and negotiating.
Combining these skills one can then use coaching to assist in clearing up dysfunctional team situations. The balance of this
newsletter discusses these skills.

LISTENING

One important coaching skill is learning to really listen to the team members and what they are saying. Be sure you understand their project related comments and needs completely. Refrain from judgment until all of the information is gathered. Then act on what is heard.

ASSUMPTIONS AND JUDGMENTS

My experience is that many engineers and technical persons tend to listen to others with severe assumptions and judgments in
place. Consequently, they can often miss more than half of what is being communicated. They often lack skills in reading message “tone” and body language because they tend to focus on the words being spoken, and are often planning their response while the other person is speaking to them.

Listening is a skill that is definitely only learned from practice. Although there are a number of courses that supposedly
train persons in this skill, it is necessary to do considerable practice to even begin to learn it. Effective courses have lots of practice built into them. If there is not a lot of interaction in a course, I suspect it is a very ineffective one.

ONE TYPE OF LISTENING TRAINING: NLP

One set of listening trainings I have become exposed to is NLP (neuro-linguistic programming). Communications between human
beings was studied and summarized by two individuals (Bandler and Grinder). Others added to this knowledge. NLP training can do an excellent job of describing what happens and what works and doesn’t work in many instances. This approach focuses on the most
critical environment for good communications – setting up rapport. The problem is that trying to learn the information presented directly, in a lecture format, instead of via practice is almost always doomed to failure with persons skilled in high tech. This subject is far too complex to describe here, but you can learn more about NLP at http://www.nlpinfo.com/ , and other similar sites and books on this subject.

ACTIVE LISTENING

Active listening is a structured form of listening to the answers to very high quality questions generated by a skilled facilitator and responding in a manner that focuses attention on the person responding to such questions. The listener must take care to focus on the speaker fully, and then repeat, in the listener’s chosen words, what he thinks the speaker has said. A simple parroting of what was heard is not effective. For this to be effective for teams, the Project Manager is called upon to be the facilitator in this process.

In the process, the listener does not have to agree with the speaker. He must simply state what he thinks the speaker said. This enables the speaker to find out whether the listener really understood. If the listener did not, the speaker can clarify whatever is unclear.

Active listening has several benefits. First, it causes team members to listen attentively to others. Second, it can avoid misunderstandings. This occurs because the listener confirms that he does really understand what another team member has said. Third, individuals often become more open. This, in turn, causes them to say more.

When team members are in conflict, they often contradict each other, denying the other party’s description of a situation. This tends to make everyone defensive, and they will either lash out, or withdraw and say nothing more. However, if they feel that the other team member is really attuned to their concerns and wants to listen, they are likely to explain in detail what they feel and why. If both parties to a conflict work towards good communications, the chances of being able to develop a solution to their mutual problem becomes much greater.

A good website for learning about active listening is http://crs.uvm.edu/gopher/nerl/personal/comm/e.html . This site describes “empathetic” listening, and the process of asking appropriate questions to encourage another person become more open.

NEGOTIATING

Often, in team meetings, there comes a time when the team needs to negotiate a solution, or set of solutions to a specific problem. Negotiating works best when it is based on Win-Win for all involved. This is not always possible, but is a good ideal to strive for. Again, the project manager is often called upon to facilitate these negotiations.

Effective negotiations occur when the team members understand each other’s interests and through collaboration, everyone reaches a mutually acceptable solution. The key to this process is collaboration, not competitiveness, accommodation, or compromise. This builds long-term relationships and optimizes results.

Negotiation starts when one person creates a solution to a proposal under consideration. An alternate solution is proposed
that changes the solution somewhat, but takes into consideration the specified variables of the situation. These specified variables need to be determined before negotiation can begin. Every negotiation occurs within a defined range of such solution variables. Within this range, an acceptable solution needs to be found. Otherwise, a win-win situation will not happen, and negotiations end. Abruptly ending negotiations can be very demotivating for the team or particular team members. The resultis a non-optimized team. When the process described is working well, it hardly seems like negotiation, in its normally understood “hardnosed” form, is actually going on.

HELPING WITH TEAM DYSFUNCTION

Another critical skill needed for the project manager to coach a team is to assist with correction of ineffective patterns that can frequently develop in the team. These show up as:

1. Conflicts
2. Missed deadlines due to lack of communications
3. Individual interpersonal conflicts
4. “Them” and “Us” attitudes between portions of the team, departments or divisions.
5. Numerous others that involve negative feeling inside the team or between the team and others outside the team, including management.

The solution to this dysfunction involves the coaching of two or more individuals independently, and then as a group. The purpose is to assist them in resolving an ineffective pattern. This coaching skill builds on all of the preceding ones already described. For this process to work, the coach must focus on individual and small group conflicts and strong differences of opinion that can demotivate the team, and make it ineffective. Again, it is up to the Project Manager point out the ineffective patterns, create the focus and facilitate this process.

QUESTIONS REGARDING SUPPORTING TEAMS

The preceding description of supporting teams is a very short presentation of how to improve team support on a real project in
the areas of Leadership and Motivation. If you have any questions, or need clarification of the material presented, please give us a call at (408) 462-2189, and we will be happy to speak with you.