Volume 2, No. 4
“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 1 of 2, discusses the areas of project team support that significantly help 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.
A SUPPORTED TEAM
What does a supported team look like? It is efficient and effective. It gets things done more quickly, with less effort and less stress on the team members. For the technical persons reading this article, it can be likened to: “a well oiled machine”, or “elegant code”, or a simple, clean and straightforward circuit design, or an “optimized” system.
WHAT IS SUPPORT?
Support for project team members is difficult to define. Unlike the other project strategies, it is very personal in nature. Learning this skill grows out of the experience of the manager and a few basic concepts. For a starting general definition, to support is to advocate for, assist or help someone.
Supporting a person or a team involves mostly the use of “soft” skills. It requires interacting with the team members and the management on behalf of the project goals. For engineers, trained mostly in technical areas, this can be one of the most challenging skills to acquire and use. My experience is that it is a skill learned much more by doing and learning, than just by taking classes.
CREATE THE RIGHT PROJECT ENVIRONMENT
Support involves creating the environment in which a project can thrive. It involves giving encouragement and letting the team learn from experience. This is in contrast to the use of forceful techniques when projects aren’t on track. It also involves getting the physical space, hardware and software tools and team resources in place during the life of the project so the team can
move quickly towards the project goals. Additionally, it involves obtaining, on behalf of the team, the appropriate assistance from the management sponsors of the project.
A SPORTS ANALOGY
Learning the skills to support a team is analogous to learning a sport. The understanding of the game is relatively easy; it is learning to play the game that is difficult. In both cases, it takes considerable practise to do well.
If your projects seem to always to be functioning under par, or late, and the team is always under stress, then you might be very wise to look into enhancing these skills for yourself. For myself, this has been a career long endeavor.
WHAT ARE THE PROJECT SUPPORT SKILLS?
A minimal list of project support skills consists of:
1) Leadership Skills
2) Motivational Skills
3) Coaching and Communicating Skills
– Listening
– Feedback
– Asking Good Questions
4. Negotiating Skills
This newsletter discusses the first two of these. The other two will be discuss in the next, part 2, newsletter.
LEARNING THE SKILLS
Unless you are especially gifted in this area, I have found that to be successful in supporting a team, it is necessary to take formal courses that teach these skills. On the other hand, just taking such courses, though necessary, is not sufficient to learn to be a good project leader.
I have found that the most effective courses in the support area allow for practise and interaction among the participants instead of just providing lectures on the subject. Even more powerful training courses combine lectures with “on the job training”. Classroom and real life experience can work together very effectively to create a superior educational environment via continuous learning and improvement.
LEADERSHIP SKILLS
A supported project team must be led by the Project Manager (PM). The PM is the leader of the team that accomplishes the task at hand. Leadership is described as having various styles. I believe that the words of the ancient Tao Te Ching describes some of these various styles in a very concise way. The Tao defines leaders in this manner:
“When the Master governs, the people are hardly aware that he exists. Next best is a leader who is loved. Next, one who is feared. The worst is one who is despised.
If you don’t trust the people, you make them untrustworthy.
The Master doesn’t talk, he acts. When his work is done, the people say, “Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!””
(See: http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#17)
This description of the Master (leader) seems, to me, to illustrate the actions of leaders very accurately. According to the Tao, the best leaders strive to take no credit in the accomplishment of the task. Not taking credit can be very hard for persons with technical backgrounds to learn. They typically like to be “right” and highly respected by their peers. Anyone that wishes to take the path to becoming a better leader must do considerable “self work” to overcome the tendency to drift towards the less effective styles instead of moving on to the more effective ones.
BALANCE AND FLEXIBILITY
From my experience, some of leadership styles are more effective than others at certain points in the life cycle of a project. As
in many things in life, balance and flexibility are the keys. For a project leader, it may be appropriate to use styles ranging
from the “military bootcamp” lower styles to the “higher” level styles. The higher level styles have been described as those that are non-confrontational, consensus building, and democratic ones. In practice, higher level styles often produce better results for high tech teams.
On the other hand, I have found that the “lower” styles can sometimes be more effective in reaching short run goals on a
project. The PM should use such styles with caution, since they often run the risk being highly ineffective in the long run. This is especially true for those styles that operate through instilling fear by using anger.
THE MOST IMPORTANT CONCEPT
The most important concept for those striving to move from OK to good to great leadership is that they first recognize that NO specific style is appropriate for ALL situations and for dealing with ALL of the team members. It took me some time to learn the validity of these words in practice.
MOTIVATIONAL SKILLS
Great leaders are often considered to be great motivators. Like support, motivation is also a very complex subject. Additionally,
it is controversial. When experts comment about motivational theories, they have expressed a wide range of opinions. Some have proposed that “there is no such thing as motivation”. Others consider it to be nothing but some form of manipulation (in the negative sense) of other people. Still, others think there is some magic formula that works to get individuals and teams to perform at high levels.
In observing myself and others attempting to motivate a team, I have noted that, on rare occasions, some manipulation can be effective to get some specific task accomplished on a project. At the more common opposite extreme, many others, including myself, recognize that motivating a high tech project team can have all of the success of an attempt to “herd” several cats across a large field.
IMPROVING UNDERSTANDING
For those wishing to improve their understanding of motivational theory, there is considerable literature available on the subject. Any serious student of motivation would find it valuable to become familiar with the various theories about it. Many of these theories derive from Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Hertzberg’s motivational theories, and McGregors’s Theory X and Theory Y. They often involve some sort of reward /punishment system. Each “system” is used to cause team members to focus and take action on project tasks. There are good discussions of these theories on such websites as:
http://www.businesspotential.com/yutaka/intro.htm or
http://choo.fis.utoronto.ca/fis/courses/lis1230/lis1230sharma/motive1.htm or
http://www.aja4hr.co.uk/management/hertzburg_motivation.shtml
RESULTS ARE UNPREDICTABLE
There does seems to be some considerable truth to each of the theories of motivation, but the results are often much more unpredictable than the theorists would have us believe. I think this is what leads individuals to conclude that motivationdoesn’t really exist. Worse still, many PMs abandon any attempt to learn motivational principles and instead try to “fly by the seat of their pants”. This will likely produce a team that is highly ineffective.
PRACTICAL MOTIVATION
Practical motivational techniques involve taking actions that rely upon the various theories at different times and in different situations until some set of them produces good results in that specific situation. This is sort of a “mix and match” approach that grows out of experience.
As a practical matter though, one of the best long range and continuously effective methods of motivating a person, or a team,
is the use of praise. It is one of major areas of Hertzberg’s “Theory of Motivators”. These motivators influence satisfaction based on the fulfillment of higher level needs (Maslow’s Theory). Others have written extensively on this subject and believe that it is very effective. In practice, it produces results.
In short, a project manager that feeds back only project difficulties and concerns, and not the positive outcomes of challenges overcome, can slow down a project significantly due to lower morale.
EFFECTIVE PRAISE
To be effective, giving praise must go beyond a PM saying “you did a great job”. Instead it is far more effective to speak about specific instances that describe what was done well and how important that it was to the outcome. In addition, praise can be done in public or private, and knowing which to do when is an art in itself.
The best source I have found for learning the subject of praise is the book “The One Minute Manager” by Kenneth H. Blanchard, PHD and Spencer Johnson, MD (See www.amazon.com). It is a simple and straightforward text on basic motivational management techniques. I have found their approaches to be very effective in many instances.
GOOD FINDING
Blanchard and Johnson recommend regular sessions of praise via “good finding” to motivate a person or a team. In contrast, they have found that many managers do just the opposite.
To quote Blanchard:
“.. most people are still managed by being basically left alone until they make a mistake that’s noticeable and then their boss criticizes them. I call that a “leavealone zap” management style or “Sea gull management.” Sea gull managers fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on everyone, and then fly out.”
(See http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/old/12268852.htm )
“Good Finding” is finding something good about each team member each time you interact with them. It takes a significant change of normal management habits to learn how to acknowledge the contribution of each team member on a regular basis. The sum total of this approach can be carried over to the whole team. I have personally never met a team member that said they received too much praise. I have met many team members that complain of not receiving “credit” for the hard work they accomplish. I recommend that all Project Managers learn this art.
OTHER FORMS OF MOTIVATION
Besides praise, other reward systems have evolved over time. Many of these involve monetary rewards. There is a belief among many
experts that such rewards are very effective, but beware of the possibility of creating a system that rewards dysfunctional behavior, when attempting to motivate a team in this way. I have experienced numerous types of “unintended negative consequences” when money was used as a motivator on a project.
One of the worst of these was when there was a large financial incentive to complete a task on a specific date, and that date passed without achieving the goal. After this time the team was severely demotivated.
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.