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Author: Susanne Madsen

5 Steps to Build Confidence in Your Team Members

Written by Susanne Madsen on . Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on 5 Steps to Build Confidence in Your Team Members

madsen May20How do we build confidence in others?

As project management professionals, one of our most important roles is to bring out the best in our team. This includes not just building a great team, but encouraging collaboration and empowering people around us. We achieve this success by helping individuals improve their confidence and make them see that their contributions and talents matter. The rewards are big—from improved employee engagement and performance to increased productivity. Here are five ways to instill confidence in your team members:

1. Help people learn and develop.

Confidence and competence are closely related. If team members feel that they’re not developing professionally and that their skills are being under-utilized, they’ll quickly begin to doubt their abilities. To increase your team members’ confidence, you have to help them improve and learn new skills so they can play a stronger role in contributing to the project.

One way of doing this is to give your team access to courses, training and conferences. Another way is to give them time to study or to run a pet project they’re passionate about. You can also set up knowledge-sharing sessions to the benefit of the entire team, or even the entire department.

2. Delegate step-by-step.

A great way to build up your team members’ competence—and thereby their confidence—is to delegate specific tasks that will help them grow in an area they’re interested in. Just be careful that you don’t delegate too soon or too quickly; and don’t leave people to their own devices when they’re in new territory. When someone lacks confidence and competence it’s far better to gradually give them more responsibility and to stick close by them until they no longer need you. Your job is to help you team members set reachable goals and to break difficult tasks into smaller steps. In that way people slowly but surely gain confidence as they start to master each step of the assignment.

3. Focus on people’s strengths.

As a project manager or team leader you’re likely to have a fair bit of influence over who does what. You can use that to actively build up someone’s confidence by giving them work that they’re genuinely good at and interested in. People’s confidence (and motivation) will generally grow when they’re given the chance to put their skills into practice and show mastery. The question you need to ask is: How well do you know each of your team member’s strengths. To learn more, check out Tom Rath’s best-selling book, Strengths Finder.

4. Be supportive.

One of the most fundamental ways to boost people’s confidence is to actively support them and build them up emotionally. And one of the best ways to create a strong supportive foundation is to connect with individuals one-on-one. When you do, make space to sincerely listen to their concerns and help them realize how much they have to contribute. When you get to know the members of your team at a more personal level (e.g., what motivates them; what really matters to them) you’ll intuitively know how to best support them.

Another way to demonstrate your support is to actively praise a team member and provide positive feedback when someone does something well. We all like to feel appreciated and it takes so little to say “Thanks, that was a superb job you did.”

5. Embrace failure.

Another great way to build people up is to let them know that it’s OK to make mistakes—as long as they don’t keep making the same ones. When you remove the fear of failure you make people feel safe. As a result, team members open up and are more willing to contribute and experiment. Knowing that they have the space to learn from their mistakes rather than being penalized for them builds their confidence and takes away an enormous chunk of negative energy and worry. Essentially, you free people up to pursue that which is truly important: The successful delivery of the project.

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The Importance of Failing Productively

Written by Susanne Madsen on . Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on The Importance of Failing Productively

I recently attended the APM (Association for Project Management) yearly conference in London. The overarching theme was Adapt, and called on the project management profession to adapt its thinking to address the increasing expectations of society – a society that has a growing intolerance to failure and expects all projects to succeed.

One of the most stimulating speakers of the conference was Tim Harford, who writes the Undercover Economist column for the Financial Times and is the author of Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. He addressed the more-for-less culture that sprung from the financial crisis, and how people are still waiting for this trend to fade once the economy is back on its feet.

But in reality this will never happen.

According to Harford, after each financial crisis we continue to operate under more scrutiny and with fewer resources. The new benchmark of delivering better projects with less funding and in less time is here to stay. What that means for project managers is that we continuously need to look for new and better ways of optimizing how we work, and that we might have to justify project expenditure through well-documented business cases. But there’s a catch for businesses that want to excel in a competitive environment.

Don’t stop at marginal gains

One of the quickest and safest ways of optimizing project execution is to look for marginal gains – an approach where we improve tools, fine-tune workflows and increase team motivation and engagement. You basically map out all of a project’s moving parts and look for any marginal improvements you can make — it’s a low-risk and a no-nonsense approach. Tweak here, tweak there, job done!

But as Harford pointed out, you only get so far with marginal gains. The big quantum leaps and breakthroughs don’t come from optimization. They come from experimenting and taking risks – actions that can be difficult to build a case for within organizations where the perception is that projects aren’t allowed to fail.

When you fail, fail productively

But as project managers and change agents, we have to remind people that it’s OK to experiment and to fail – in fact it’s necessary at times. How else can we find that ingenious new solution to our client’s problem? The key is to fail productively, as Harford put it. We need to learn from our failures and accept that mistakes can be good as long as they genuinely help us advance and get closer to our end goal.

So, how can we as project managers start to fail productively? Well, the first step is to understand and then overcome the following risk-adverse roadblocks.

Roadblock 1: Wanting to fit in

Most people want to conform and therefore shy away from taking risks. Many of us have been encouraged to fit in to the social norm for our entire lives – especially during our school years. Only a few people are willing to put their reputation at risk by endorsing ideas and initiatives that might not work out. The bottom line here is that we fear both failure and not being enough.

Solution: Before you outline a solution or agree to a certain way forward, make sure you have identified all possible options – including the high-risk ones. The trick is to not automatically discard the high-risk options out of fear that they’ll fail or be rejected. Instead, look at them objectively and assess if the potential benefits could outweigh the risks. Also become aware of what the worst case scenario is and how you – and the organization – would deal with it. Often the worst case scenario is much more manageable than we initially imagine.

Roadblock 2: The more-for-less culture

Budgets are often tight and many organizations have an increased demand for perfection, smooth execution and certainty. The more-for-less-culture means that managers are expected to deliver projects to pre-agreed budgets and timeframes. And so, they choose the safe option which gives them quick wins and fast results.

Solution: Show the decision-makers and sponsors that less risk equates to fewer possible rewards, and that true innovation is associated with risk-taking. You can do this by creating a compelling business case which demonstrates the potential long-term benefits of taking a higher risk approach. Also build the extra buffer into your plan and budget that account for uncertainty and changes along the way.

Roadblock 3:

We often get angry at ourselves when we fail. And instead of using our failure productively and refining the course, we let our brains close down. We go into meltdown mode, and make even more mistakes and poorer decisions.

Solution: Remind yourself and others that there is no such thing as failure – only feedback about what works and what doesn’t. To prevent a meltdown, first identify all the ways in which this perceived failure benefited you or the team, such as: new knowledge, insight, experiences, process improvement, etc. Also look at what you can do to change the situation so that you get a better outcome next time. This is basically why post-project reviews and triages are so important.

What’s your risk IQ?

So now what’s left is assessing you own attitude to risk-taking, and determining how much experimenting and creativity you put into the inception of a project. Some questions to ask yourself: Are you the kind of manager who likes to be on the safe side? Someone who operates within the parameters given to you and who focuses on optimization and marginal gains? Or are you a leader who does what is right for the team and organization no matter what the rebuttals are? Do you understand that at certain moments, it’s time to experiment and to put your own reputation at risk for the greater good?

These are some questions to get you thinking. Tell us your thoughts and experiences on taking risks on your projects. How else can we fail productively and take meaningful risks at work?

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.