A Guest Editorial
This month we present Edmund Fish's observations as our guest editorial. His thoughts were triggered by our September 2001 Editorial "Is Project Teamwork Overblown?"
Two's company three's a crowd. It's flippant, but it gets forgotten when we talk about teams. The underlying assumption is that if you put some people together, i.e. tell them they are all working on the same project, you instantly have a project team.
This is perhaps a bit harsh and some people give lip service to the principle of forming - storming - norming - performing and eventually adjourning. Even so the focus is on the storming onwards. None of that can happen if there is no forming.
There is some interesting sociology work on groups that is effectively focussed on the forming phase. They distinguish between a collection of individuals and a group, the group being the 'formed' precursor to a team. They have found a key element for a person to cease to be an individual, or member of another group, and be part of this group, saliency (1).
People see themselves as part of many groups; white, male, engineer, family, Lakers fan, stamp collector, project X member, department Y member, employee of company Z, etc. For most project managers the issue is how to make being a member of project X more salient than being a member of department Y. If project X isn't going to make a difference to the individual's success within company Z, or elsewhere, compared to their other work then project X is on the back burner. Forget how keen they seem in the project meetings, they’re surrounded by the project and of course it's salient, but what happens the minute they leave?
Delivering salience is harder than it seems. It has two effective components, needs and identity. Identity seems easy, the sociologists found that just telling people they belong to a group made them predisposed to favouring other members of that group. So, tell people they are part of the project X team and keep telling them. The real catch to identity is having a "them", people who aren't on the team. Now you've got "them" and "us" and a chance for open rivalry, without "them" there is no "us".
This is where the needs come into it. The group has needs and the individual has needs. If these needs can be lined up then you are away, but you might note this is tied into the nebulous field of motivation. If another group has greater demands or fulfils the individual's needs better than this group, bang goes the saliency, and gone is the chance of a team. If your project isn't going to get them a pay rise or a promotion, what chance do you think you have? Saliency is a delicate flower, treat it with care.
In today's corporate environment we still haven't shaken of the shackles of the functional hierarchy, and the matrix doesn't make things any better, so we can forget real teams. Big projects with enough corporate focus and time span might just get those teams off the launch pad. Equally, small companies, where the departments are not big enough to make internal politics worthwhile, can make teams because the same people work together over and over again. Perhaps this is an explanation of why small companies constantly outmanoeuvre large ones.
Despite the tone above, my own experience on the sporting fields, although not quite those of Eton, have proven to me that a team can beat a group of more talented individuals. It's not just common goals, both teams want to win; it is shared goals where the team's success is more important than the individual's and that this is in the individual's opinion! People will gladly make sacrifices for the team because the team will look out for them.
I'm not doing down the talented individual, I like to imagine on occasion that I am one, but two heads are better than one. No man is an island and any of his work is going to have an impact on other members of the project. A good team may have its shining stars, or grumpy old men, but they know that their success lies with the team and will fight for the team when push comes to shove.
(1) The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of Current English defines salient as a.jutting out -n salient angle. -sa-lience n
Editorial Note:
Edmund Fish graduated from Aston University, Birmingham (UK) with a BSc in chemistry and biochemistry and went on to complete an MSc in Process Biotechnology at Birmingham University (UK). He has held a number of post in the fine chemical and pharmaceutical sectors, including shift production manager, process design engineer, design team leader and project manager.
Edmund has recently completed the Diploma in Engineer Management, which included a thesis "The Design and Implementation of a Project Management System Based on Best Practice" that is to be presented at the IPMA World Congress in June 2002. Currently he is providing freelance engineering consultancy. Edmund can be contacted at edmond.fish@brunnermond.com