Many team building models show trust, communication and other so-called “soft” skills as  foundational to team building.   A recent example is Patrick Lencioni’s best selling “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”.  His pyramid model shows lack of trust as the first dysfunction that must be overcome.  Lencioni’s book is a quick read and a pretty good example of how to get a team out of dysfunction.  If you’ve read it, you may recall that while the protaganist calls a series of “executive retreat” meetings, what they do in the meetings is real work:

1. getting very clear about priorites and top goals so that they have a way of knowing if they are improving,

2. reviewing progress with the permission and the expectation that peers will hold each other accountable, and

3. hashing out how resources should best be utilized in order to ensure top priorities are met, etc.

As the leader takes the team through these steps (in the book) she makes it very clear that no team member can be successful unless the entire team is successul.

At the end of the story there is a summary about how to progress through (get past) the 5 dysfunctions.  After demonstrating that team building occurs while doing real work, I thought this section fell back into the fallacy of team building as separate from doing the real work.  Even so, Lencioni points out that to get through the first step of overcoming lack of trust, team members need opportunities to make promises to each other and follow through on them.  At Ensemble, we put a huge emphasis on this with our Commitment-based approach.  Work review meetings are designed to make sure team members are making and meeting promises (commitments) to each other every week throughout a project.   With the CBPM approach, every meeting is a team building meeting even though zero meetings are dedicated to team building activities.

As always with commitment, some of the importance aspects, as Bergman describes are:

1.  Get crystal clear about what this new course of action is (what, when, where, who)
2.  Make a decision to follow the new course now, and do things to make it difficult to back out
3.  Tell others about your decision

Now imagine if you were on a team where everyone was adhering to these techniques in a systemic way.  The effect is magnified when you have a group of people applying this discipline to a complex, interdependent task.  What you are imagining is what we call Commitment-Based Project Management (CBPM).

]]> http://ensemblemc.com/2012/01/23/hbr-guy-says-commitment-is-not-motivation/feed/ 0 http://ensemblemc.com/2012/01/04/the-hardest-lesson-to-learn/ http://ensemblemc.com/2012/01/04/the-hardest-lesson-to-learn/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:23:28 +0000 Timm J. Esque http://ensemblemc.com/?p=1736 This is obviously a judgement call and you may have your own opinion of the hardest lesson to learn.  I encourage you to make a Comment and share your own view.  Based on over 25 years of observing, helping and participating with project and process teams, I believe the hardest lesson is – slow down in order to go fast.  The purpose of slowing down of course is to do things right the first time.  Most of the time lost in execution is lost re-doing things that were not done properly the first time.

We’ve all experienced making time consuming errors when we rush to complete even minor tasks.  The risk and the impact go up exponentially when we’re talking about a team of people working interdependently with each other to get things done.  On waterfall projects, this often means having to rework large parts of the ultimate project deliverable.  On agile projects you find out much faster if you are making errors or heading down the wrong track.  But in the rush to get started “doing productive work”, even agile teams can have costly mis-starts.  Agile software teams often don’t take the time to get clear about how their outputs will integrate with the larger intended outcome.

This is not a new observation and experts are pointing it out all the time.  In an Forbes article from earlier this year, McGuire and Tang from the Center for Creative Leadership point out how speed is entangled with complexity and uncertainty.  In a complex and uncertain environment, speed requires clarity and clarity requires some time spent up front having appropriate conversations.  A new book I will be writing more about is called Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution.  Based on a combination of studies and cases, the authors say that the key to speed of execution comes down to clarity, unity and agility (view author interview).  Clarity and unity especially require time in the planning stage to make sure people are pulling in the same direction and that it is clear why it is worthwhile to do so.

Because this problem is systemic, it can be difficult to know where to start to address it.  In our experience the problem starts with the top down deadline that is often given to project teams before they even begin planning.  The first step to slowing down to go fast is for the sponsor’s of projects to replace the top down deadline with a request.  The request is for the team leadership to get with their team and define what it will take to achieve the project goals.  Generally, there is too much uncertainty for the team to know exactly how long it will take.  They need to set and monitor short term deliverable goals and report on their ability to meet these “horizon” plans.  Over time it will become apparent if the team is likely to achieve the necessary time goals.  But either way, teams given the chance to have input into the plan and to operate from their own goals, will achieve those goals without shortcuts that lead to costly delays later in the project.

Those of us in business schools in the late 1970′s and interested in human behavior at work learned similar principles based on research from the 1950′s by Frederick  Herzberg, Rensis Likert and others.  You may be aware of the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation which comes from this research.  Herzberg concluded that money is not a motivator.   It is important and will cause problems if  it is unsatisfactory (he labeled it a “hygiene” factor), but it is not what causes people to succeed.  The new research concludes that money can be a motivator and even improve performance, but only when tasks are simple and predictable.  Any of you working with those types of tasks on your projects?

If problem solvers and innovators are not primarily driven by extrinsic rewards, we need another way of ensuring that we can get and keep the interest of the most talented people.  What causes people to commit to solve complex problems and ensure team success?  What causes people to commit in an environment of inherent uncertainty?

Forced to adapt or concede to mediocrity, the general manager of the Oakland A’s starts looking for new ways to compete.   Open to possibilities, he notices an unlikely source of scouting information.  A young economist who has radical ideas about how to evaluate ball players.    The key premise is that if you ask the wrong questions, the answers do not lead to reliable results.  The economist shows the GM how searching for desirable player characteristics by watching them play and noting the most basic individual statistics does not address the key question – what individual performances add up to a winning team performance?  I won’t ruin the ending of the movie for you, but let’s just say it was worth taking a new look at player evaluation.

Project management also has its traditions.  Some are already being questioned by agile, lean and commitment-based approaches but others still seem pretty engrained.  What happens when we look at project management through a totally different lens?  The lens I would suggest is a field called human performance technology.  HPT starts with a different set of questions about organizational performance.  When it started in the early 1960′s, the big questions were:  what is performance and how do you measure it?  This led to the insight that accomplishments (outputs, deliverables) are valuable and activities (effort, tasks) are costly.

When you apply this logic to projects, you start to wonder, why is so much focus put on estimating effort and so little put on getting crystal clear about who is delivering what to whom?  The HPT perspective on management also says that timely feedback is critical to effective decision making.  Teams and team members need to know exactly where they stand against their goals or commitments in order to know when to raise a flag before it is too late to stay on track to goals.  If your teams don’t know exactly who needs to deliver what to whom by when (and to what quality standard), and/or if they don’t know exactly where they stand against their plans at all times throughout the project, they are not being set up for success.

Full disclosure – I happened upon this human performance technology (HPT)  perspective as I was finishing up grad school and I have been active in the society that promotes it for 25 years – the International Society of Performance Improvement.  We at Ensemble have built the HPT principles – what science tells us about what performance is and how to measure and change it – into our Commitment-Based approach to project management, and everything else we do.  Learn more about HPT at www.ISPI.org.

The best dictionary definition I’ve found for the word accountability is:

The quality or state of being accountable; especially: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility to account for one’s actions.

What I like about this particular definition is that it identifies the two very different reasons people are willing to be held to account- out of obligation or out of choice (willingness to accept responsibility).  We’ve been polling our workshop participants and other audiences for over a year now about which they would rather have – a team of people who feel obligated to meet specific assignments, or a team of people who have chosen to make sure this project is a success.  Guess which team PMs would rather work with?  We wouldn’t ask of course unless we had some recommendations for what the PM can do to create an environment where contributors will choose to take responsibility.

Creating an environment of responsibility, and ultimately accountability, begins at the very outset of team formation.  What the PM can do here is to communicate effectively to prospective and/or assigned team members not just what the project is, but why it is worthwhile and important for this project to be a success.  As the leader, you are role modeling choosing to commit to the success of this project.

Next it is imperative that you have a way to ensure all of the contributors participate in creating the project plan.  We recommend a technique called Map Day which is described in detail in my book No Surprises Project Management (ACT Publishing, 1999).  Map Days can be very structured events with every contributor present for one or two full days, or they can be less structured 1-3 hour events.  The key is that contributors leave with clarity not only about their specific role, but also about their interdependencies with other roles – the other members of the team.  It is our experience that when people see where they fit into the larger project picture, they choose to take responsibility for more than just the part they have direct control over.

The third critical thing the PM can and must do to create an environment where contributors choose to take responsibility is to deliberately turn the project plan into a network of personal commitments between team members.  Personal commitments will generally need to be made and reviewed on a short interval (often weekly) basis, so this last step is not something you complete in the up-front planning meeting, but rather a process that continues throughout the project.  Anyone who has committed to complete something in the current week, is expected to show up to a very short review meeting and declare if they are done or not done.  This meeting is also where new commitments for the next 2-4 weeks are made.  The expectation for team members to hold themselves and each other accountable in these brief meetings are set back in the early planning stage, when people realize they are part of a network of people dependent upon each other in order for this worthwhile project to succeed.   We’ve been helping PMs implement these practices for over 15 years now, and this works!  Why be a babysitter when you could be a leader?

The Golden Reporting Rule came about when we were working with teams under tremendous schedule pressure in the mid-1990′s.  It became apparent that one of the factors leading to quality issues and pushed schedules was fear of reporting the accurate status of the work in progress.    The stakes of being on schedule seemed so high that it was just too punishing for team members to speak up and say they weren’t sure they could complete specific deliverables on time.  Of course, having accurate status is critical to effective utilization of resources and for making trade-off decisions that allow teams to achieve goals in a dynamic environment.

Part of the solution is for team members to speak up, not just when it is time to report progress, but immediately when they determine they are in jeopardy of not meeting their upcoming milestone.   But that is only half of the solution, because until something is done about the fear, nothing is really going to change.  The Golden Reporting Rule has two equally important parts, think of it like the two sides of a coin.  On the one side, team members must speak up as soon as they determine they need help to stay on track, but the other side of the coin is how the leadership responds to these “early warnings”.  These warnings are important information, and that is how leadership needs to respond to them.  Beginning with “Thanks for speaking up”, followed up by the appropriate questions for helping the individual and the team get back on track.  Only when both sides of the coin are addressed, is a team following the Golden Reporting Rule.

The Golden Reporting Rule is one of a few simple rules that are part and parcel of Commitment-based Project Management.  To understand some of the other rules and how they came about, you can click here to get to an extended excerpt from the book “No Surprises Project Management”.