Are You Capturing Their Hearts?

by Mike Wold, PMP  

In his most recent book entitled The Art of Winning Commitment, Dick Richards, an insightful leadership coach and consultant, makes the observation that during the 20th Century there was a rapid growth in what he calls “democratic consciousness”. He points out that at the middle of the past century 31% of the world’s population lived in democracies whereas by the end of the century this percentage had doubled to 62.5%. He argues that living in an open democracy with freedom of the press coupled with the rapid improvements in access to information has made us more and more difficult to be led (or misled as the case may be). Dick says that one of the consequences of this worldwide growth in democratic consciousness is that “acceptance of any particular authority is more optional than it once was. Political leaders can be voted in or out of office, new jobs can be found, with new bosses”.
 
Nowhere has this independence been felt more than in the relationship between project managers and their teams. Dealing with this independence in leading a project team was difficult enough when we were managing projects where most of the team members were in our department. Although we did not have a lot of authority since we did not do their performance reviews or hand them their paychecks, at least there was a good chance we had developed some kind of a relationship with them in the past. In addition we often had a lot of similarities in the way we looked at things. Now many of our projects seem to span across the entire organization and often include unfamiliar and diverse members from outside the organization like our business partners, contractors, and suppliers.
 
Admittedly it has always been challenging to lead a project team due to the lack of traditional management authority and our inability in most organizations to apply basic management tools like performance reviews, reward systems and disciplinary actions, but now there is even less authority as the team members become ever more independent and act more as “independent agents”.
 
In the face of increased independence of our team members, increased complexity of our projects, more diversity of the team composition and fewer organizational tools to influence the behavior of the team, what can a project manager do to get the team commitment needed to have a successful project?
 
Further on in his book Dick Richards talks about four levels of commitment – each level providing increasing levels of energy to the team:
 

 

• Political – “You scratch my back and I will scratch yours. I will contribute my talents to your project if I get something tangible out of this cooperation.”
• Intellectual – “This project is really a great idea. I can see the logic behind it.”
• Emotional – “I have some passion around this project. It really psyches me up!”
• Spiritual – “This project seems to align with my personal mission, values and why I am here.”
  

 
 As project managers we tend to focus on the first two levels of commitment and avoid the other two. This is perhaps because the political and intellectual arenas are quite natural to us, but the emotional and spiritual worlds are new and scary territory. Who wants to be viewed as a “touchy feely, kumbya” leader? Who wants to take a risk that might erode our already shaky leadership position or even worse be ridiculed by our team members? Even if we believe it makes sense to enter the other two realms, who has the time to do it?
 
Admittedly many less complex projects can be successfully completed while staying in our comfort zone and focusing only on gaining political and intellectual commitment from our team members. The problem is that for more complex and dynamic projects, focusing only on the political (tit for tat) world and the intellectual (good idea) world, may not allow us to get the level of commitment necessary to complete these types of projects successfully. Even with less complex projects we may find that the tools we can apply to the political world are very limited by our lack of authority and sometimes even the logic behind the project can be challenging to communicate to get the intellectual commitment.
 
Because of the importance of gaining emotional and sometimes even spiritual commitment for many projects, I would like to share some practical approaches that have worked for me in the past to gain higher levels of commitment. I call it “capturing their hearts”.
 
The first thing I try to do, especially on the more complex projects, is to spend some time communicating individually with each member of the team early in the project, ideally prior to the kickoff meeting. This can be difficult to schedule and time consuming, especially with “virtual project teams” or large teams, but time has shown me that the investment has a big payback down the road. During the meeting or phone call I tend to ask four types of questions – personal, professional, preferred style and project based. In general these questions are aimed at understanding the person’s background, interests, talents, preferred styles, concerns, and motivations. For example:
 

• Personal
• Where did you grow up? Do you have a family? What do you like to do to relax? How long have you been working in this field? Where did you go to school.
• Professional
• Where are your strengths? What do you like to do professionally? Where are you focusing your professional growth? What rewards do you like to get for good performance?
• Preferred Style
• How do you like to be managed? Do you like to work in teams or alone? What communication style to you prefer? What motivates you on a project? How would you characterize your personal style?
• Project Based
• What kind of experience have you had with this type of project? What are you trying to get out of the project – personally and professionally? What excites you about this project? What concerns you about this project? What questions do you have about the project or your role on it?
  

 
During the conversation I try to communicate my view of what the project is all about, what I know about the background, why I think it is important, what kind of support we will be getting from the sponsor and management, why the person’s talents are important to the project, why I am committed to it, why I think it is a good idea, why I am excited about it and, if appropriate, how it relates to my personal mission.
 
It is not enough to engage in this kind of dialog early in the project and then forget about it in the heat of battle on the project. Once the relationship is established it is important to use the information that has been shared by the team member in making decisions and enhancing the relationship with that person.
 
Why does this approach seem to work? Many studies over the years and personal experience have pointed out the following:

• People like to work for and will make a commitment to a leader who understands them as a person, irrespective of the work or project setting.
• People like to have their talents known and used. They want to make a contribution.
• People like to work for a leader who understands their preferred style and respects it. For example, a characteristic of many modern workers is the desire to be managed by end results and provided with their own “space” to work in without micromanagement.
• People like to work on projects that have meaning – for the department, company, and ideally for society and respond when they know its importance.
• Today’s workers know that they are really independent agents (especially project managers) and they like to learn new marketable skills on their projects.
  

 
As you start your next project, seriously consider an investment in “capturing the heart” of your project team members. It will pay big dividends, especially when the going gets rough on your project.
 
 
Mike Wold is a coach, mentor, facilitator, teacher, and consultant in leadership development and project management. He is a principal associate of TeamWorks International Inc., a company that helps leaders and their organizations move forward using unique FrameWorks™ for Leadership Development which help create insight, alignment and action. Mike is also an associate of Fissure Corporation, a Minnesota based company that assists organizations in developing leadership and project management capability using state of the art computer simulation technology, which has a long-standing partnership with TeamWorks International. Mike has over 25 years of leadership and project management experience at all organizational levels in both private and public sector organizations. Mike brings his unique blend of humor, positive energy, vision, values and action orientation to his work with his clients. He has served on the board of directors for the Minnesota Chapter of Project Management Institute and remains an active member as the Chapter That Cares Director. He is also a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).