PROJECT TEAM CULTURE

Each project team develops its own team culture. The project team’s culture may be established deliberately by developing project team norms, or informally through the behaviors and actions of its project team members. The project team culture operates within the organization’s culture but reflects the project team’s individual ways of working and interacting.

Human beings have a set of biases, some of them unconscious and some of them conscious. For example, one person may feel that unless a schedule is displayed using a software-generated Gantt chart, that it is not a true or valid schedule. Another person may have a contrasting bias that detailed planning any further out than 30 days is a waste of time. Being open and transparent about biases up front establishes a culture of openness and trust that can enable consensus and collaboration.

The project manager is key in establishing and maintaining a safe, respectful, nonjudgmental environment that allows the project team to communicate openly. One way to accomplish this is by modeling desired behaviors, such as:

• Transparency. Being transparent in how one thinks, makes choices, and processes information helps others identify and share their own processes. This can extend to being transparent about biases as well.
• Integrity. Integrity is comprised of ethical behavior and honesty. Individuals demonstrate honesty by surfacing risks, communicating their assumptions and basis of estimates, delivering bad news early, ensuring status reports provide an accurate depiction of the project’s status, and in many other ways. Ethical behavior can include surfacing potential defects or negative effects in product design, disclosing potential conflicts of interest, ensuring fairness, and making decisions based on environmental, stakeholder, and financial impacts.
• Respect. Demonstrating respect for each person, how the person thinks, the person’s skills, and the perspective and expertise the person brings to the project team sets the stage for all project team members to adopt this behavior.
• Positive discourse. Throughout the project, diverse opinions, different ways of approaching situations, and misunderstandings will occur. These are a normal part of conducting projects. They present an opportunity to have a dialogue rather than a debate. A dialogue entails working with others to resolve divergent opinions. The goal is to arrive at a resolution that all parties can embrace. A debate, on the other hand, is a win-lose scenario where people are more interested in winning personally than they are in being open to alternative solutions to a problem.
• Support. Projects can be challenging from the perspectives of technical challenges, environmental influences, and interpersonal interactions. Supporting project team members through problem solving and removing impediments builds a supportive culture and leads to a trusting and collaborative environment. Support can also be demonstrated by providing encouragement, showing empathy, and engaging in active listening.
• Courage. Recommending a new approach to a problem or a way of working can be intimidating. Likewise, it can be challenging to disagree with a subject matter expert or someone with greater authority. However, demonstrating the courage that it takes to make a suggestion, disagree, or try something new enables a culture of experimentation and communicates to others that it is safe to be courageous and try new approaches.
• Celebrating success. Focusing on project goals, challenges, and issues often sidelines the fact that individual project team members and the project team as a whole are steadily progressing toward those goals. Because work takes priority, project team members may defer recognizing demonstrations of innovation, adaptation, service to others, and learning. However, recognizing such contributions in real time can keep the project team and individuals motivated.