Cohort 8 of The High Performing Project Manager Program begins Monday 23rd February, are you in?

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ISSUE #34

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Ever feel like you care more about the project than anyone else on the team?

You're chasing updates, flagging risks and staying late to fix the formatting on a slide deck and wondering how the team member who was responsible missed it.

It's exhausting and it's a fast track to burnout. It's a bit like scope creep, lot’s of small things, but they always add up to more work, more calls, more messages and less time for you to focus on what’s important for your role.

When employees show up to do the bare minimum, this turns us into project parents constantly reminding people to do their jobs.

An analogy that made me chuckle was shared by one of the students in the HPPM program.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m a football coach, but as well as telling them what to do, I’m also having to move around the pitch moving their legs so they’ll kick the ball and be in the right place to receive the ball, it’s never ending.”

It’s a downward spiral, as the more help you provide, the less responsibility and accountability they feel, as you can’t force ownership.

You need to create a team that moves from task-doers to outcome-owners. Here’s a few ways to help.

1 - Stop being the Chief Problem Solver
​Every time you immediately fix a problem, you train your team to be dependent on you. Next time someone brings you an issue, ask: "What do you think we should do?" Push the thinking back onto them. It takes longer initially, but it builds proactive thinking in the team.

2 - Stop talking
​As a PM, we want to help, and this often results in being the first to put our hand up to own a problem or task, when in some cases there is either someone better qualified in the team or they may have ideas to solve it. This links to the first tip, let the team speak and come up with ideas, so be the facilitator rather than the action owner.

3- Co-create the plan (don't just present it)
​If you build the perfect Gantt chart alone and present it to the team, it's your plan, not theirs. People support what they help create. Involve them in defining how to get there. Create the structure of the plan, let them fill in the blanks.

4- Create real world roles and responsibilities
​If you’re just ticking the boxes in a RACI document, you’re missing a trick. Ask the team about real world responsibilities. For example;

“Tell me what you’ll do when you have a problem on the project?”

“How will you present your work to the client?

“What will you do when I’m on holiday to keep the project running?”

These types of questions get the team thinking about how they’ll take ownership when needed.

5 - Connect the what to the why
​Tasks without context are just admin and just easy to delay and be worked on without much thought.

Update the database is boring. Update the database so the client can launch their sales campaign on Monday has purpose. Remind the team who's waiting on their work and why it matters.

6 - Action playback
​In meetings, don’t playback the actions you’ve captured, ask each team member what actions they’ve taken down. By speaking their actions in front of their peers, they’re more likely to do them. Plus, you’ll get to hear if they’ve understood them correctly and in some cases, they may capture things you’ve missed.

So to summarise, don’t get in their way by helping too much, you’ll only hold them back and in some cases give them an easy out.

Increasing ownership and accountability in your team doesn’t happen overnight, it’s doing lots of small things to help and improve.

Be the facilitator, and you’ll find your life gets easier and your team gets better.

Have a great week,

Ben 💪🏼