“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”
— Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple, Inc.
As leadership and organisational culture consultants, Peopleology is privileged to work with exceptionally experienced and high-performing individuals and teams daily. However, it strikes us that project teams, especially in the infrastructure sector, are too often thrown together based on their respective technical expertise with commercial contracts pitched against each other. In doing so, a collision course is set as the project complexities and uncertainties raise a culture of adversarial self-promoting behaviour.
When the scope has seriously crept off course, and costs and timeframes are seemingly out of control, someone must be at fault. Right?
It is often at this point that Peopleology comes in. When a project culture is highly dysfunctional, with more time spent pointing fingers than delivering. While we relish collaboratively turning cultures around and supporting teams to deliver projects, there is an easier way.
A 2019 Australian study suggests that establishing and embedding a best-for-project culture from the outset should be viewed as an insurance policy for projects on tight deadlines and interfaces. It involves using the Project Facilitation Model as a coaching tool to foster team integration, cooperation and trust, ultimately leading to more effective project delivery.
The key elements of project facilitation
The basis for engaging an externally led Project Facilitation Model is often recognition that successful project delivery depends on equitably managing the technical aspects of the project and the often-complex people and organisational dynamics. Designed to address relational barriers, facilitate focused conversations, and drive collaborative and best-for-project outcomes, the essential elements of the model include a pre-project workshop, monthly project leadership workshops and post-project review workshop.
The pre-project workshop builds cross-functional familiarity and appreciation of each other's needs, requirements and showstoppers while setting the project's ground rules and behavioural expectations. Monthly project leadership workshops promote and enable the solutions-focused robust conversations and joint-problem solving required to continually build trust and psychological safety across the team. The post-project review workshop facilitates an objective evaluation of the lessons learned during the delivery stage, supporting subsequent project process improvement.
Ultimately, the process results in a best-for-project culture that underpins a high-performance project. Do you see value in this type of insurance for your projects?
