High-performing team anyone ?

There are hundreds of books on how to develop a high-performing team. With matrices, and pyramids, and 5-7-9 steps processes. All guaranteed to lift your team to high performance. Have you ever googled “high-performance teams” ? When you look at the images that appear at the top, you don’t see a new product development team at an engineering firm, or a management team at a famous bank. You see pictures of an F1 team, or a rowing team in action. And some advertising for consultants who will transform your team with their magic formula !

Why is it that it is typically sports teams that get described as high-performance teams, while management teams only seem to aspire to reach that level ? In my experience, a key factor that sports teams apply without hesitation and in a very formal way, is … learning. After each competition, won or lost, the team will get together and analyze in very deep detail what went well, and what didn’t go well. Military teams coined the concept of the AAR, the after action review, often right on the battlefield when everybody’s recollection of the events is fresh. A boxer shared recently that after a win, his team goes right to watch the video to see the moments where the opponent, although beaten, managed to break through the defense. And they would adjust the training program to focus on that particular weakness.

In organizations, we use similar ‘tools’ like PDCA or six sigma control loops. But that seems to be applied most often to the front-line processes. When it comes to management teams, the step of reflecting, learning and planning for improvement is often watered down to a project closure report that is sent around asking to ‘rate’ and fill in comments. Or when all went well, there is a team celebration that is for sure fun but doesn’t really go in any depth, and doesn’t allow the team to learn. Teams are so busy they often consider they don’t have the time to reflect on what is behind them, because a mountain of new challenges lays ahead.

Yet dedicating some time to have an entire team review, in a facilitated setting, the key learnings and needs for improvement will go a long way to enhancing team collaboration – over time. A team might have issues, and sometimes we are stuck with “the deck we were dealt”. But if each time a team completes a project, challenge, customer account or major event, it can learn from this experience and do better the next time, it will develop a growth mindset that moves it up towards the level of high performance, whatever its starting point is. Learning is not something abstract that happens in people’s heads: it is a team activity as much as the actual project work.

Emergency ! Is there a project manager in the room ?

Project manager is probably one of the least exciting titles to carry on your namecard. Really, what is there to manage about a project ? It's much cooler to identify yourself as being in business development, or at least have "innovation" in your job title. Yet two recent events in the news reminded me of the value of project management.

Apple brought out the iPhone 5 but the improvements of the phone were completely overshadowed by the talk about the disastrous map application that replaced Google maps. Not just some difficult-to-identify bug but real issues that make the application nearly useless.
4GS was awarded the contract to recruit and train security staff for the London 2012 Olympic games. 16 days before the opening ceremony, the company informed the organizers they were still missing more than 1700 guards. PWC made an audit after the fiasco and reported that the company did not realize the scale of the work, and listed numerous errors, including bad management.

These are not small projects. They are immensely important for the companies, their stakeholders, and reputation. These projects were in the works for years, with hundrerds of people involved in each company. Was there any project manager in charge ... ?

Here is a reminder of a few basics of managing projects towards success:

- milestones or deadlines are there to be met: if you do not reach your objective at a certain stage in the project, you need to change something  for the project to get back on track ... action is needed and just continuing and hoping for the best at the next milestone makes no sense;

- a no-go means we don't go; Steve Jobs was notorious for dictating design changes when the curve of a button or the sound of a click was not to his liking. These were critical elements (for him) and compromise was not allowed. If a customer-critical requirement is not met, the project manager needs to make sure the product is not launched hoping customers won't notice.

Project management is not very exciting, and only comes in the news when something goes wrong. Project managers deserve credit for all the projects that we don't talk about: those that deliver on time, budget and quality in a complex world.