The Personae of a Superlative Project Manager

How do I do Project Management effectively? How to avoid attrition in my team? How to manage my team passionately and formally? How to interact and collaborate with my teammates? How to keep the work environment friendly?

These are some of the queries which often run in a project manager’s mind who wish to expand his/her soft skills.

Being a Project Manager, you need to have different personae to be well-organized and well-operative in your project management work style.

The first and foremost thing is to get a positive impression from your teammates. As soon as a new employee joins or new projects are assigned with resources, spend some time to understand the employee’s personal and professional aspirations instead of hurrying to set out expectations. Invest time to know about their interest, hobbies, learning skills, and passion, which will benefit you to analyze the team member and identify the right fit. This will also help you in setting expectations as per his/her comfort. When team members talk about their achievements, recognition, interests and skills, acknowledge and appreciate them. Also, encourage them to indulge in the engagement activities or events happening in the organization. This would make them feel that they are valued and will be recognized here, too.

Always think about the time when you joined an organization or when you were given the responsibility of a new project or a team. You would have expected a friendly environment and a positive approach by your colleagues. Similarly, every new employee will join with some expectations and career aspirations.

Our initial/first discussion will instill confidence in the organization, convey positivity about the work environment and also provide a good impression of the manager whom he/she reports to. We can set the expectation on day two or as per the project work or after the training or before the learning curve, but not on day one for sure. New joiners or new project teams need to have some breathing time to understand the environment and the other teams also require quality time to bond with the team.

Setting Expectations

Setting expectations is an art. Always set the expectation with an optimistic approach instead of defining multiple rules, disciplines, and frightening them with client’s expectations and work pressures. One must understand mutual prospects rather than the manager emphasizing on individual project or temporary demands.

I will share my thoughts and ideas regarding how I set the expectations with my team. Please consider it while you work, else create your own set of criteria to set the expectations constructively.

I recommend my team to follow three ethics very stringently. Those are:

• Focus on your commitments. Respond to any form of communication. Acknowledge or respond to emails, messages or for that matter any kind of communication. People expect you to respond.
• Inform as per necessity. Let your supervisor know your unavailability, in case you have committed something but expecting some delays due to your absence.
• Bring issues upfront. In case of issues that need to be discussed upfront, insist on last-minute updates.

These are some of the important qualities that every resource should follow. Let’s take the plunge on some of the key commitments you need to focus on meticulously.

Focus on your Commitments

Commitment is the heart of any project team. Commitment towards anything related to the project needs to be inculcated into the team at any point in time. Committing towards the completion of work is not only the focus. Committing towards everything, for e.g., updating a document, sharing the files, mentoring team/colleagues, helping the team to achieve the project milestone, involving in meetings/discussions, and sending reports on time etc.

Sticking to the commitments should be a mutual agreement between the Project Manager and the team. In case of any deviation, the Project Manager’s task is to get into the root cause behind it. Understanding and guiding the team then and there to be on track is the Project Manager’s primary responsibility.

Avoid doing micro-management regarding Work Hours, Leaves, Attendance, and Swipe in/out Time, if work is being delivered on time. Micro-management will demotivate the team, employees will deviate from the project work and not give importance to quality and delivery results. They will concentrate on their attendance rather than focusing on the work accomplishment. When we are flexible, we are likely to expect more productivity and potential.

Project team will be more responsible and accountable for their work if they have flexible work hours and hence, won’t need to stretch and complete the work if anything is incomplete without Project Managers’ awareness most of the time.

We have to include this point during the expectation setting meeting, mentioning that the team will have flexible hours and no micro-management will be done during execution of the work unless any abnormalities crop up. This gives the team a very strong mindset to focus on work completion thereby, delivering quality and they will be glad that they can have a work-life balance environment.

There can arise few cases were people might take advantage of the flexible work hours and not be committed to their work. In that case, definitely as mentioned above, Project Managers should be identifying things and be a little aggressive to help in bringing them on track along with the progressive resources.

Hint for Understanding Team’s Progress without Micro-management

Being a Project Manager, your key responsibility is to execute the project development without any non-conformities and the ultimate goal is to deliver the project on time with maximum quality. For that, always keep your team sociable and Project Manager should be easily approachable for any impediments, queries, support, and guidance.

Project Managers need to be seriously involved with the team to know about the current scenario and progress. Start making conversation informally and, slowly understand the status and the progress of the project rather than listening/questioning everything in the stand-up call.

Keep an eye on all the governance and see to it that the trackers are updated on time from the resources. Avoid questioning each and everything in person; rather accumulate all drives and documents on your own. In case of any work associated pointers required from the team which necessitates corrections, additions or modifications, perceive project team’s occupancy and understand their availability to discuss whatever, without pressurizing them. Attempt to help them as much as you can, apart from the coding part, as per your convenience. (If you are comfortable guiding or assisting in coding, it’s good.)

Give them logical support, try to park yourself with them, and do the debugging on the code. Help them in providing guidance reasonably, which should benefit them to identify the way to solve the issue, if the team has any.

In this way, the team will have a good rapport with the Project Manager and in case of any issue, it will reach out to the Project Manager to get the required guidance. Hence, the Project Manager will be the highest fragment of development and project execution team.

Feedback Plays a Massive Role

Providing Feedback

Take the opportunity to give feedback by appreciating frequently, to the team members. While giving feedback at all times positivity should be the first thing along with motivation and appreciation. Then slowly move on to the improvement areas by understanding from your teammate what he/she is thinking about the particular scenarios. Go with scenario-based discussion and give precise direction to them to address their problem areas.

Getting Feedback

Most of the Project Managers don’t give much importance to receiving feedback about their work style and self-improvement areas. PMs ignore getting feedback about him/her from the team because of multiple reasons like the team might talk about their contribution, monitoring of projects, management style, and so on but a good Project Manager would be willing to take feedback from the team and identify improvement areas, which will aid them to fine tune their soft skills.

To conclude, the Project Manager’s role is to do people management meritoriously with a comprehensive focus on commitments. There is a corporate saying, “If we take care of our team members our team members will take care of our clients”.

I hope this article throws some light on the importance of People Management and how it is an integral part of any organization. All the best with your ‘people managing’ endeavors.

By,

V Padmalatha, CSM- Project Manager, RapidValue