When a project fails, people start pointing their fingers everywhere, trying to shift blame instead of salvaging the situation. Project failures give managers a unique chance to reflect on their strategy and identify reasons of failure. Most of the time, these problems lie with the project team you choose for your project.
Selecting the wrong people for a critical position hurts your chances of success and puts down your entire team. This is why it’s extremely important to assess the skills of your team, identify their strengths and weaknesses, and assign them tasks accordingly.
The best fit candidate for a job must be the most qualified for that position, compatible with the company’s culture, and suited for your style of leadership. In this article, we will identify which traits you must prioritize to make your team members ideal for a position in the project team.
Matching Candidates to the Position’s Skills Grid
With so much competition in the market, it’s extremely hard to find candidates suited to your company’s requirements. In such situations, it helps a lot to create a metric to evaluate all candidates based on your requirements. A skills grid for every position provides us a great opportunity to validate incoming candidates according to their skills and discover the talent that closely matches our requirements.
During a project, you can create different roles and lay out a grid that outlines which skills are important in that particular role. This will make it easy for you to choose candidates for a position on merit, increasing your chances to deliver project requirements.
Motivated
Motivation is a critical factor in the workplace and a key driver behind performance. It enables the management to meet the organizational goals, enhances productivity, and improves overall output.
Unmotivated employees don’t focus on work and are not as much engaged. Such unproductive behavior not only causes unnecessary delays for the company but also wastes considerable resources, especially if the majority of the workforce is affected by this. This is why companies need to pay attention to the level of motivation in employees.
Keeping teams motivated has always been a long-standing challenge for most project managers. To be a good project manager, you should have the expertise to manage both the functional and emotional factors of your team.
Negligence in this matter can also cause high performing and strongly skilled employees to exhibit negative attitudes due to their emotional burden. If you don’t manage both factors simultaneously, you’ll end up delaying important projects that cost way higher than what you expected.
Free from Behavioral Risks
A behavior is a range of actions and mannerisms exhibited by your team members. We may have different perceptions of people when we assign certain tasks to people. However, most times, people do not behave as we expect them to and display hidden characteristics over time.
Even team members who were seemingly distant and uninvolved in discussions could be only nervous because of the new environment.
To be able to use people according to their talents, you need to understand the hidden aspects of their behaviors and get the most of them.
Still, some people can do the opposite of this and change their behavior in a negative way. Their change of behavior can disrupt the flow of work and cause unnecessary delays.
Ready to Collaborate and Engage
In many project teams, silos become an obstacle in a team’s performance as a unit. Every team member has a unique personality and uses different ways of engaging and collaborating with people.
If engagement is minimal between different departments, collaboration suffers. Although project teams may still work together, the internalized nature of these group's team affects impact collaboration.
Engaging team members help diminish internal silos within project teams. This is why project managers are responsible for balancing internal teams effectively.
Project managers need to lay the groundwork to engage team members and stakeholders. This will help them to sustain a good relationship with all members and stakeholders in both the short and the long term.
You must monitor the level of engagement of individual team members across the project lifecycle. You should also address their emotional and personal expectations to bring about their best performance.
If you don’t address these issues yourself, it would be extremely difficult to create a good working environment among your team. Consequently, it would affect the performance of your team and make it harder for them to achieve the targets you set for them.
Suitable For Office Culture
Understanding the culture of your team members is one of the most factors when it comes to project management. People are sensitive about their culture and most times, it means different things for different people.
From the perspective of project management, culture means how people act in a professional environment. A person’s culture is something he or she carries as baggage along with himself or herself.
A project manager needs to interpret what kind of culture his organization has. However, doing that is extremely difficult, especially when you have to manage people spread across different regions.
People may respond differently to your instructions according to the culture they’re associated with. This may affect the productivity of your team and your ability to achieve goals within the given timeframe.
For this reason, managers have to be quick on their feet. While it does take some time, but investing your time and attention in understanding the culture of your team members can managers cope with problems more efficiently.
When you’re working with a complex team of individuals and firefighting problems to keep the project on track, ensuring timely delivery of projects can be challenging. That said, every member of your team is a strategic asset for you.
As a project manager, it’s essential to address the cultural, behavioral aspects of your project team. Understanding and utilizing the strengths and weaknesses of each team member can help you use them effectively in different situations.
Despite the complexities within teams, if you address their concerns, motivate them, and maintain an inclusive and collaborative environment of collaboration, you can transform your team into your greatest strength.