Category Archives: Team Building

How a Culture of Accountability Impacts Solution Delivery

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Recently I have been thinking about how leadership and culture plays an essential role in our ability to deliver quality solutions.  More importantly how accountability will have a direct impact on our ability to help team members stay engaged and empowered to produce positive results.

There are different accountability chains based on the alignment of project resources.  Specifically, when you look at matrix project reporting structures vs functional project reporting structures you will have different layers of accountability.  The type of project organization structure has a direct impact on the project leader’s ability to influence or drive accountability.

When you do not have a culture of accountability in your organization you will have some of these resultative behaviors:

  1. Morale issues – top performers tend to disengage.
  2. Siloed behavior – you will hear “well my resource manager told me to do this” specifically observed in a matrix organizational structure.
  3. Rescuer behavior – because the person believes they must make up for others not performing their respective roles on the project.
  4. Active disengagement – because the team do not feel empowered to hold each other accountable for results.

From my experience on leading projects in both matrix and functional project structures I have found that it is critical that the project and program leader focus on these key qualities to embed accountability in your solution delivery practices.  This is not an all-inclusive list but rather some key focus areas to drive:

  1. Goal setting – set clear expectations up front and inform the team how they have influence in the team’s ability to be successful by clearly defining what success means.
  2. Empowerment – reinforce with your team that there will be mistakes, and if we as a team own our mistakes, learn from them we will move on and be better for it. This safe environment approach will help your team members embrace their empowerment.
  3. Process adherence – with clearly defined delivery processes established the team have a roadmap on how the overall solution will be delivered.
  4. Encourage continuous improvement – as a leader you need to encourage the team to bring their thoughts and ideas on how to enhance or change processes for better outcomes moving forward.
  5. Team accountability – the team need to understand the goals of the delivery and then hold each other accountable.
  6. Measuring success – the team need to understand how their performance will be measured and how their respective inputs align with the overall delivery success.
  7. Celebrate success – recognition and success are key motivating factors for your team. It cannot be underestimated the major benefits of team morale in simply recognizing key success milestones and as a team celebrating.
  8. Tools and transparency – collaboration and document management tools are essential for your team’s ability to communicate and share key information throughout the delivery. Setting these up early in the delivery cycle and then validating that they are effectively being used is a critical aspect not to be underestimated.

In closing, project and program leaders play a critical role in how accountability drives quality solutions.  Understanding your corporate culture and how you can lead your teams through solution delivery by reinforcing accountability through the solution delivery will lead to successful delivery solutions and help drive your company closer to a culture of accountability.

What do you mean have fun?

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In previous articles I have ended with the statement to remember to have fun. We have all been on projects that have required excessive hours and were extremely stressful as we moved through delivery. While it is important to keep the team focused on delivery it is equally important to find ways to step away and as a team take time to have fun.

My thoughts on this have evolved as I have gained more leadership experience. Early in my career I had a valuable mentor that consistently reminded me of the need for the team to engage in team building activities, and this advice has continued to be invaluable as I have built engaged teams.

In this article I will provide some examples of different team building and team fun activities that have been successful in my experience. You need to understand the culture of your organization and the different personalities on the team to determine which activities will work to achieve positive results.

Recognition and Team Morale Lifters
Some of your projects will have unique names that you are able to leverage. I was responsible for delivery of a solution to develop an internally built application that supported a wide range of internal lines of business. We used the opportunity to name the application by holding a competition where we encouraged all the project stakeholders to submit entries to name the application. The winner was going to receive a small prize along with the recognition of being the person who named the application. The entries we received ranged from very creative to quite humorous. We engaged our internal brand team to be the judge for the winning entry. Once the winning entry was determined I had the name and logo added to t-shirts and gave these to the core project team. This provided an opportunity for all the project stakeholders to engage in a fun activity and the t-shirts allowed the core team to wear our new gear on stage gate events to promote the project.

On this same project we used a fun competition during the user acceptance testing (UAT) phase in order to find system defects or “bugs”. One of the team members created a fun animation that announced the game. Each week throughout UAT the person who identified the most bugs received a gift card. This resulted in a very high number of defects being identified prior to production which as we all know is the best result for overall acceptance.

Another project had a unique name that included the word “Star” as part of the project name. I ordered very inexpensive star shaped tchotchkes that I stapled pieces of paper that contained words and phrases of encouragement. At one of the stage gate lessons learned activities I handed out these tchotchkes with some fanfare. I still have a star tchotchke on my desk ten years later!

Internal or External Activities
One of our PMO team members was a recognized professional artist. She invited a group of us to her home one weekend and encouraged us to bring acrylic paint materials. She gave us loose instructions on what materials might be helpful to create certain types of results. During the day the biggest takeaway I had was how much we all encouraged each other. We built a camaraderie that we took back to the office that was lasting.

Other types of team events include going to shops to paint pottery, create mosaics, and going to a cooking school to cook meals together. We also would take an afternoon and go to lunch and a movie or miniature golf. These were inexpensive activities and were a lot of fun. There were the occasional nights of dinner, bowling, or arcade game venues that included appetizers and refreshments. Some of these activities brought out healthy competition amongst the team which was an added benefit.

On a more current project I was in a city that held Paint Night events which is where you sign up and they supply the painting materials and instructions on how to approach painting the picture. This provided many fun conversations post the event on how different we all interpreted our instructions!

Team Building Activities
I use team meetings as an opportunity to engage in team building activities. Recently I needed to build out a large project team to support a business transformation program. Since I was new to the team, and each week we had new team members join, I used our team meeting as the way to get to know each other. I started out by doing activities like “tell us three things about you” to actual full on team building games. Each week I would ask for a volunteer to come up with the next week’s game. We would spend the first part of the hour working through team updates. We would spend the second half of the meeting engaged in the game. A few examples of the type of games the team came up with included Pictionary like games, guess the bird sound, build a spaghetti tower, and musical chairs spin-offs to name a few. One of the games resulted in the team meeting at a nearby park to play volleyball and those that did not want to play were very noisy spectators! I heard on numerous occasions from different team members that all week they looked forward to the Friday team meetings.

In summary, it is vital to your team health to remember to step away, have fun, and build lasting relationships. There are many different ways to achieve this but the key is to consciously take the time!