Tag: culture change

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Leaning to Action Leaning to People

Did it fail because of the team?

Teamwork-by-Annie-Spratt
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Cecile was unhappy that I left her hanging with my previous article on where we place the praise or blame for project failure or success. I had hinted at the team.

Yes what about the team then, Patrick ? Hoping to read the rest of your always deep analysis!

Cecile Bertholier

And Cecile is quite correct. I’m grateful for her question. I did leave you, the reader, hanging. So I am bringing forward this follow-up article in my editorial schedule.

If we set aside the traditional management mindset for a moment and consider the project manager as a leader of change, we can move beyond looking at the hierarchic levels and entities of the organisation, the project manager and the project team. Instead, we consider the challenges of leading a project team through change.

Action-Centred Leadership

We could look at the world of project management through the lens of John Adair’s Action-Centred Leadership:

Adair considers the actions a leader must take, whatever their working environment. He maintains that to be effective, the leader must:

  1. Achieve the task
  2. Build and maintain the team
  3. Develop the individual

He goes on to list a number of responsibilities for the leader under each of these categories.

Hiring Great People?

I wouldn’t disagree with Adair. Also, I am seeing much emphasis these days on hiring great people as meaning hiring deep expertise in particular exclusive specialisms and then letting them get on with clearly-defined work while keeping the whole team informed.

This, too, is fine – as far as it goes – but a group of geeks is not a team.

“Ah, yes!” you might be thinking. “There needs to be team synergy.” Well yes, but I feel that even the associations we have with the word synergy are usually not deep enough.

An Unregarded Critical Success Factor

A true leader changes the environment around her. She brings out things in people that perhaps team members did not even know they had within themselves. That leader begins to model values, and guard a culture, even if she never uses the language of culture. It is possible – and I have done it from time to time – to create a culture within a project, that begins to outperform the norm within the surrounding organisation. 

Sure, as Adair says, the good leader does pay attention to the goal of the project and the individual contributions towards that goal (task), as well as good team-working, while developing the individuals within the team. Yes, John Adair, that leader ticks all your boxes. 

But can we go deeper and help individual team members engage with matters beyond their individual domains in positive ways? Specialists can show up to meetings as generalists; geeks can become generous, and contribute to discussions in domains other than their specialisms. And they discover in a culture of honour and respect. This encourages team members to lean towards others with empathy and greater influence.

The Villain of Failure

So, back to the question: who do we blame when a project fails, or when its outcomes are disappointing? 

The fact is that projects are, by definition, unique means that they are not kind learning environments, as psychologist Robin Hogarth would describe them. We lead a project, we are not navigating something as rules-based as Candy Crush or World of Warcraft. No. In Hogarth’s terms, a project can be a wicked learning environment. For example, we find that what worked for us before may not work next time, even in the same project.

What we require is high-order intuitive leadership. This kind of leadership creates a positive, engaging, honouring culture that invites people to own the challenge of the whole project; to cross into domains where they may feel vulnerable and incompetent at first. But backed by a positive, encouraging leader, they learn to be brave, to share in generous conversations, and to discover breakthrough solutions from within the team.

Maybe I will publish a further article on this and share my biscuit-based culture…and how this worked on a computer server engineering project. But that is for another time… and, of course, the biscuit culture may never work again. 

It could just crumble. (Sorry! Awful pun!)

Do leave your comments below.

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Categories
Leaning to Action

Everybody wins

I felt like I had stepped into another world … and in several ways, I had. Here I was, with my adult son, Ben, visiting us from Los Angeles, and both of us, albeit strangers, were being honoured and celebrated by strangers.

We had come to Princes Park, the home of Dartford Football Club. Dartford (‘the Darts’) was about to play Hungerford Town in the National South league. And I was there to visit my friend and Outlier Group member, Alan Dean.

We were greeted warmly by the Chairman and staff, and a panel interviewed my son about what he had been doing in Los Angeles, and what it was like to live there. Then, our hosts gave us a tour of the stadium before the match started.

Ben was invited to join the welcome tunnel, applauding players from both teams as they trotted out onto the pitch. But the honour didn’t end there. As a final flourish before the game started, our hosts asked Ben to join them in the centre circle to pose in a photo opportunity with the match referee.

And who were our hosts? There were all teenage students from Kent schools!

They are part of a media team of a not-for-profit organisation called 4Roles4Goals; a company set up by Alan and his business partner, Nicola Coppen. The genius of 4Roles4Goals is that it adds value to Young People, Schools, the Community and Business – the four roles – working together.

I would say that there is another group that is impacted positively by this initiative: families. Before the match, I was talking to one of the parents. He described to me the transformation he saw in his daughter, and how she has grown visibly in confidence.

Before she was someone who preferred to be in the background, now she thinks nothing of going to the team and pulling out one of the players for an interview.

He went on to explain how his company had moved to Dartford, and his firm was one of the early commercial sponsors of the club, resulting in his company receiving over 30,000 positive tweets. Not bad business either!

As we drove away, Ben just shook his head in disbelief at how they had called him up as a VIP. It was a powerful illustration to me how we all need to be celebrated.

Also, there is something about our society thinking outside of the box, outside of the categories we make for ourselves. 4Roles4Goals shows that everyone can win.

Categories
Self-Awareness

You’re Not Crazy!

Am I Crazy?
Collage of handsome emotional man isolated on white

Sometimes it seems as if the whole world around you has gone mad. And then you begin to doubt that yourself. “Am I still sane?” you ask yourself. Sometimes that is what a dysfunctional culture can do to you. It makes you doubt what you thought you knew for certain.

I was talking with a client is who leading a major transformational change and she was beginning to see signs of it all unravelling. Even the people who were supposed to be taking the lead on certain aspects of the change were flipping between platitudes – “everything is fine” – and defensiveness. She needed to talk to someone sane, so she called me. In this example, our culture can be dangerous: it can blindside people to very real problems. If enough people agree, they can be denial until there is a disaster is inevitable. Culture can do that.

Sometimes culture can seduce us into acting like lemmings.
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Here are some common symptoms to watch out for:

  • Silo-working on a programme that would have a far-reaching impact.
  • Project teams focused solely on tasks and technology.
  • Over-optimism about the results to justify their earlier case, the so-called optimism bias.
  • Under-resourced and over-extended managers who have just been given another 42 strategic goals.
  • Key early adopters in the change who still don’t know what’s going on only a few weeks from “go live.”

Another way of describing culture is a conspiracy of conceit. Culture can seduce us into acting like lemmings; we are about to rush over a cliff to our deaths and we all think we’re doing fine. We take false comfort in each other. An antidote is to listen to someone from outside, who is not in that culture. And that’s hard to do when your first reaction is to say, ”But you don’t know how we work here.”

I told my client, “You’re not crazy!”
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I told my client, “You’re not crazy!” She needed to hear that, in the teeth of such huge cultural inertia. She is doing well but needs encouragement, support, and guidance, in that order.

Question: How do you support your colleagues when they are not going with the cultural flow? I’d like to hear how you do it.