Lesson 4 Leading The Project Team
Lesson 4 Leading The Project Team
PMI Authorized PMP Exam Prep Lesson 4: Lead the Project Team
The goal of this artifact is to provide a quick overview of lesson 4 of PMI Authorized PMP Exam Prep. The purpose
of this document is to provide opportunity to the course participants and enable learning anywhere anytime. The
idea is to provide content that reinforces all the topics covered in the class on Saturday as part of the PMP course
at Education Edge.
Project professionals use interpersonal skills, including collaborative leadership, communication, an innovative
mindset, for-purpose orientation and empathy. Teams with these skills can maintain influence with a variety of
stakeholders — a critical component for making change.
• Use emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills to lead with empathy; be mindful of individual and
team aims and working relationships.
• Cultural and diversity aspects are important elements to implementing effective leadership modes.
• But also look at more kinds of diversity, including differing motivations and working styles of individuals
and groups, which can vary greatly based on their experiences, age, culture, job roles and many more
influences.
• Focus on creating a psychologically safe environment so that team members feel empowered — this
takes transparency and fostering a sense of openness.
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Communication and openness to learn from others builds trust and improves the optimal options to lead various
team members and stakeholders.
Leadership Styles
• Different from skills, these are styles that leaders need to be able to use in different environments.
• You should know a few of these and learn the differences between them; but on the job, the foremost
requirement is to be able to adapt and tailor your leadership style to the situation.
• You’ll need to factor in your own, the team’s and the organization’s experience with the type of project —
e.g., is this a new kind of project, or a new development approach?
• Assess your team’s maturity—experience levels, team-working experience, personality types and
combinations are all factors in determining the appropriate styles to employ.
• The governance structure of your organization will influence your leadership style. This reflects the
influence of organizational culture.
• Finally, where are your team members located physically and how can you enable them to work at their
very best under potentially challenging conditions.
Style Characteristic
Consensus/
Team operates autonomously
Collaborative
Servant Leadership
• This is a key concept – Service to the team through addressing needs and development of team members.
• Rather than manage projects and teams, trying to keep the project on plan and the team in line, servant
leaders help teams develop and grow as a group and as individuals.
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• Servant leaders facilitate the team's work by providing coaching and training, remove blocks that impede
work progress, either from people or processes, and focus on team accomplishments rather than team
misfires. To help reflect this change in orientation, many organizations use the term project leader rather
than project manager.
• Servant leadership means leading by supporting the team and addressing their needs. This style aims to
understand the team's needs and take action to enable the team to perform and deliver.
• Support the team with a conducive environment and lead with communication by removing distractions
or roadblocks.
• You are working for the team; therefore, you must focus on their needs. Being a servant leader requires
skills such as active listening, coaching, awareness, and facilitation.
• Challenging the status quo can open new ideas and perspectives. Challenging the way things were done,
or are being done at the present time, assures all involved that this is the best approach and the best
product. It also breaks complacency and blind acceptance.
• Encouraging healthy skepticism on all aspects of the project and its vision helps stakeholders not overlook
anything and assume too much.
Team Building
• Team-building is critical to ensuring that the team functions in a cohesive manner, working together in the
same direction.
• Team-building activities unify. Working collaboratively toward a shared goal is a great way for team
members to help each other reach a higher level of performance.
• Team-building activities are the specific functions or actions taken to help the team to develop into a
mature, productive team. They can be formal or informal, brief or extended, and facilitated by the project
manager or a group facilitator.
• Managing engagement with virtual team members requires persistence and a focus on good team
dynamics, especially transparency, accountability and active attention to effective communications.
• Teams communicate better face to face, and there is lots of evidence of the criticality of being able to
assess body language and tone of voice to ensure that team members have bought into the approaches
they are using together to solve problems.
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• Use appropriate tools such as shared calendars to plan meetings, coordinate feedback, and
improve visibility to goals and activity status
• The environment and location of a project team are extremely important elements to leading and
managing projects.
• If the team feels involved and engaged, their interactions will be more meaningful.
• Give people autonomy in their work so they are empowered to take initiative when they need to. Your
KPIs will help you detect and monitor subpar performance easily.
• Colocating all involved in a shared workspace fosters more informal and immediate collaboration and
exchange of information.
• Even the passive information that is absorbed from the surroundings — such as ad hoc discussions, side
conversations, whiteboard drawings and physical body language have value.
• Being immersed in the team physically and mentally improves the team's ability to work faster, more
collaboratively, and in a more unified way.
• In agile projects, meaningful interaction is a core tenet. To encourage frequent, free-flowing interaction,
the team structure and workspaces must be conducive.
Here are some good practices for storage and distribution of artifacts:
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• Use a storage and distribution system that matches the complexity of the project.
• Use cloud-based document storage and retrieval systems for larger projects, especially if team members
are geographically distributed.
• The project manager and/or team selects and adapts the appropriate artifacts for use on their specific
project, tailoring them to the unique need of the project.
• Not every process, input, tool, technique or output is required on every project.
• Artifacts typical of predictive include project charters, change requests and baselines.
As much as possible, you should try to standardize an approach to artifact management. These are some helpful
guidelines that will help guide good practice.
• The project manager and/or team selects and adapts the appropriate artifacts for use on their specific
project, tailoring them to the unique need of the project.
• Not every process, input, tool, technique or output is required on every project.
• Artifacts typical of predictive include project charters, change requests and baselines.
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• Some projects use a configuration management system to track project artifacts and monitor and control
changes to them.
• The configuration management plan describes how the information about the items of the project (and
which items) will be recorded and updated so that the product, service, or result of the project remains
consistent and/or operative.
Version Control
• Include a date/time stamp and the name of the user who made the changes, providing a digital “paper
trail” of the document’s history.
• Use version control for important artifacts such as subsidiary project management plans, the scope and
other documents.
• Empowerment, team unity and autonomy are characteristics of high-performing teams that should be
cultivated in any project team.
• People contribute their best because they feel proud of their work and are empowered, by being given
shared responsibility.
• The team needs to be empowered to make decisions collaboratively and in a timely manner. This
increases the team's responsibility to deliver a product with complete ownership.
• When challenges arise during the project, empowered teams act with a greater sense of responsibility.
• Encourage the team to foster team collaboration and decision-making. The team does not depend on
heavy-handed discipline. The team must recognize the power and influence they possess. As an
empowered, cohesive unit, they depend on each other to make decisions and solve problems to deliver
desired value quickly.
In projects, the team is the most important component. Without a unified team, the project falls apart and project
management becomes insufficient.
• Use a light management touch, and one that is appropriate to the situation. Any interference with the
team is disruptive, and it can reduce the members’ motivation to work.
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● Embrace diversity
● Psychological safety goes hand in hand with diversity. This is an agile team concept that is also useful in
predictive team settings. Trust and mutual respect are essential to an empowered team.
● Quite simply, it means that team members should be comfortable being themselves in their work setting.
● Empower your team by creating and maintaining a healthy work setting that embraces diversity of all
kinds and is built on trust and mutual respect.
• The team charter and ground rules should be reviewed and updated as needed on a periodic basis.
This checklist of questions will help ensure the ground rules are maintained throughout the project.
• When the project is in motion, the team should always have the ground rules close at hand.
• If the project context experiences change, the team charter or ground rules might need updating.
• Ideally, the team should go through the “forming” stage again whenever it changes, but this can happen
quickly in dynamic projects!
• Finally, if a rule has been violated, the team needs to ensure the appropriate response depending on
leadership and composition of the team, and coach that team member back into alignment.
• A reward and recognition plan is a formalized way to reinforce performance or behavior. Reward and
recognition plans are generally standardized throughout an organization and approved through corporate
channels. The purpose is to motivate the team to perform well.
• Rewards can include monetary gifts, additional vacation time or other perks, company plaques or
trophies, or small gifts. Although it is common for the terms “reward” and “recognition” to be used
interchangeably, they are different.
• Be transparent and fair when using rewards and recognition. People need to know how they can be
achieved.
• Tailor the rewards and recognition. Not everyone is excited by the same reward.
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• Also, when given too often, they can become expected rather than earned.
• Individual and team rewards and recognition can be used for motivation.
• Individual recognition and rewards can sometimes create unwanted competition or animosity among the
team and should be monitored closely for negative effects.
• Decision-making is a core function of all teams. They need to make decisions about activities, risks,
estimates and many other challenges.
• Forming a team includes deciding how the team will make decisions together and how they will handle
conflict resolution when disagreements arise.
• For example, it may be highly desirable to seek consensus, but the team may want to identify how they
will respond when consensus can't be reached.
• You can decide in advance to take the highest estimate in case of persistent disagreements.
Decision-making techniques are used by a group to reach a decision. This technique is an assessment process that
can have multiple alternatives and can lead to many outcomes.
● Voting is a way of factoring in a lot of input before making a decision. It also gives everyone on the team
an equal voice and is therefore preferred in many contexts.
You should also know two other, non-consensus based methods of decision-making:
● In autocratic decision-making, one team member makes the decision for the group. Sometimes, such a
method is required in cases of straightforward decisions that don’t require a lot of input.
● Teams can use multicriteria decision analysis to make decisions. This involves the use of systematic and
analytical approaches to find a solution. It is less reliant on opinions than voting.
• In predictive settings, tasks are assigned and, in that way, people are made accountable for completing
specific work.
• In hybrid and adaptive teams, Kanban boards are typically used. Make sure that all team members have
easy access to the board, so they can update their work activity on it. Some teams build their boards on
office whiteboards and that works great, as long as the team sits in one room.
Virtual Kanban — a great option if your team is more scattered around the office, town or country. Such a board is
a hassle-free, easily editable, online application that your team can access via a web browser or smartphone,
regardless of their location and working hours. It is an example of an information radiator.
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Supported team members perform better and are motivated to do their best work. You’ll need strategies to
maintain support for individuals on the whole team. These are mainly focused on emotional intelligence and
communication.
• Teams are typically more productive and driven when they have clear objectives to meet. Project
managers can support the team by setting objectives collaboratively with the team.
• Project professionals collaborate to create joint objectives that are challenging, yet attainable.
• Objective setting can be conducted at the start of a project or phase, but is commonly done throughout
the project life cycle, such as in an Iteration Planning session in which the team sets the targets and
commitments for the upcoming time period.
Personality Tests
It’s useful to get a better understanding of personalities on the team. Some teams use personality tests and
indicators to create more meaningful interactions.
• They can be used as a way of obtaining behavioral predictors, but they are not absolute.
• Build trust
• Empower team members by aligning their strengths with knowledge-sharing or coaching roles.
Some personality type categories include introverts, extroverts, pragmatists, innovators, process-followers. The
point is not to categorize people, but to understand them a little better.
Personality assessments can be useful to achieve better understanding of other team members. Typically used in a
human resources (HR) or recruitment function, they attempt to measure human psychology.
● DISC
In addition to personality tests, psychological metrics or psychometrics are useful for analyzing personality
indicators.
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You can then adjust within the team to the emotional and other needs of team members and key project
stakeholders.
Psychological team roles are useful for understanding how people think, and therefore, what types of roles or tasks
they may best be suited for or, conversely, not readily suited for.
Think of roles or tasks suitable for each of these psychological role profiles:
Emotional Intelligence
• An important interpersonal skill of all project managers is Emotional Intelligence (EI). EI helps you
understand your emotions and those of others to help minimize conflict. The notion of EI evolved in the
1990s and is now recognized as a key set of personal and interpersonal skills.
• The personal side includes self-awareness, self-regulation and motivation, whereas the interpersonal side
comprises social skills and empathy.
• Self-awareness measures how well you know your own emotions in a variety of situations.
• Self-regulation defines how well you can control those emotions.
• Motivation describes your intrinsic reasons for achievement.
• Empathy is how well you read and understand the emotions of others.
• Social skills address how well you build relationships and rapport with others.
Empathy
Empathy is a critical emotional intelligence skill that profoundly affects your ability to relate to and establish a
rapport with others. It expands vision and decision-making beyond the immediate circumstance and your
individual priority.
• Having empathy helps us to help ourselves (inward) and to help our team (outward).
Understanding others
Service orientation:
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• Coaching and mentoring, when appropriate, and providing tasks that stretch and nurture a person’s
abilities.
Leveraging diversity:
• Appreciating various life philosophies and being conscious of group contrasts without judging.
• Viewing variety as favorable circumstances, establishing conditions where different types of groups
can thrive.
• Showing consideration for and connecting with people from diverse groups.
Political awareness:
• Grasping the influences that determine opinions and behaviors of clients, consumers or rivals.
• To lead people towards having the desired social skill set, you need to motivate them.
• Motivation is the EI skill associated with your personal, internal abilities. It's about raising your
ambition to attain peak performance. Let’s review this while thinking about how to nurture and grow
these factors in yourself and the team.
Motivation
Achievement/Drive
Commitment
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Initiative
Optimism
Effective project leadership means establishing meaningful and collaborative relationships with all stakeholders.
Communications are both personal and strategic. As a project leader, you need to manage volumes of informal and
formal conversations, emails, documents and so on. You also have to establish healthy, collaborative working
relationships within the team and with stakeholders. The key to both is effective communication.
• Project managers spend a great deal of time communicating with stakeholders, so it is important to
ensure the right information is getting to the right stakeholder so timely decisions can be made, issues
addressed and expectations met.
• Effective project teams rely on healthy, active communication to enable collaborative learning.
Collaboration with stakeholders looks different in each project, but let’s look at some general guidelines to creating
a project culture that is tied together with fluid communication.
The communications management plan is a component of the project management plan and is used by project
managers in predictive environments.
Here’s the full list of what’s included in the communication Management Plan
• Escalation processes
• Sender
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• Flow charts of project information, workflows with possible sequence of authorization, list of reports,
meeting plans
• Guidelines and templates for project status meetings, project team meetings, emails, website and PMIS
• Active listening and performing feedback are critical communication techniques that every project team
member should practice.
• Using active listening, the listener must focus attention on the message to the end, rather than trying to
formulate the response prematurely. The receiver should confirm receipt and understanding of the
message, often by restating or paraphrasing the message, or using body language, head nodding, etc.
• The most important aspect is to provide confirmation that the message sent was understood. That can be
done through feedback.
• Open dialogue and meaningful communication optimize the understanding of the aims, as well as the
expectations of the results and what needs to be done in order to realize those expectations.
• Everyone’s involvement and engagement in the project may fluctuate or remain constant. That level of
engagement is evaluated and reevaluated throughout the project.
• Keeping discussions transparent ensures appropriate stakeholders are knowledgeable and expectations
are set. Engagement also builds appreciation for others’ needs and constraints.
• Communication skills, interpersonal skills, feedback meeting management, among other management
skills, are leveraged to maximize the feedback loop and engagement between stakeholders.
Collaboration Activities
• Stakeholders collaborate every day in a project. Some stakeholders may be engaged less frequently; for
example, a project sponsor who gets updates monthly or a product owner who only engages with the
development team three or four times during an iteration.
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• The frequency of engagement is based on mutual needs and expectations. Nearly constant engagement
among the core project team is common. Encouraging that regular collaboration can be supported by
daily stand-up meetings and collocating teams near each other for more face-to-face communications.
• More infrequent collaboration can be supported by scheduled sessions such as milestone reviews,
backlog refinement sessions, and project update meetings.
• Determining and optimizing collaboration activities is an ongoing team effort spearheaded by the project
manager in predictive settings.
• Everyone can and should avail themselves of training, coaching and mentoring opportunities.
• These activities occur as part of projects as well as external to projects — for example, an individual’s
professional development path.
• Agile coaches or scrum masters help teams to develop their agile practice and foster more effective and
cohesive teams.
• There is a separate stakeholder training that is done at the end of the project as part of the transition plan
— to prepare those stakeholders (normally not involved in the project effort) to utilize the results of the
project.
Training, coaching, and mentoring are three activities related to knowledge sharing. Project management
practitioners will engage in all three at some point in their careers.
• Training provides specialized skill building for individuals and the team. It can be formal or informal, on
almost any topic from “soft” to technical skills.
• Coaching opportunities can be done in pairs or groups; they help put knowledge into practice over an
extended period of collaboration.
• Mentoring is a long-term relationship between individuals, which aims to transfer skill sets and
knowledge from the more experienced party to the less experienced party.
You don’t necessarily need an agile coach to learn adaptive methods. Self-organizing teams coach and mentor
each other every day in their work. Taking a cue from them, here are a few more ways of sharing knowledge
while working:
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• Effective conflict management can lead to improved understanding, performance, and productivity.
• Conversely, ineffective or nonexistent conflict management can lead to destructive behavior, animosity,
poor performance and reduced productivity, all of which are disruptive to teams and threaten successful
completion of a project.
• Managing conflict is a responsibility of all stakeholders. The direction and handling of conflict are heavily
influenced by the project manager.
As a servant leader, you assist in the removal of impediments or sources of conflict. In agile projects, the team lead
facilitates conflict resolution sessions or the team is empowered to resolve conflicts as they best see fit.
• Managing conflict is a responsibility of all stakeholders. The direction and handling of conflict is heavily
influenced by the project manager.
• In agile projects, the team lead facilitates conflict resolution sessions, or the team is empowered to
resolve conflicts as they best see fit.
• Team members need to be able to exchange ideas and points of view about work.
• Disruptions to the status quo can lead to conflict or new opportunities, equally.
• The team would have previously collaborated to create ground rules, including how to address
conflict.
• A psychologically safe team environment is essential.
There are six basic approaches for handling conflicts; each is effective in different circumstances:
• Smooth/Accommodate
• Withdraw/Avoid
• Compromise/Reconcile
• Force/Direct
• Collaborate/Problem Solve
• Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR): Arbitration and mediation
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