Individual attitudes and behaviors have a profound effect on our organizations. An attitude is “a position or manner indicative of feeling, opinion, or intention toward a person or thing.” Attitudes help shape our outward behaviors, which are “how one conducts oneself, acts or operates”.
I’m a project manager by profession and am a professional consultant (www.digineer.com) in the field. My work takes me to lots of industries. I am also adjunct faculty in the departments of civil engineering and construction management at the U of Minnesota, as I teach classes in project management there. In my more than 20 years of experience putting together professional project teams myself and watching others do the same, I’ve seen an unfortunate thing. When it comes to putting together project teams, selection of teams in the professional arena too closely resembles team formation at the start of a playground pick-up kickball game. The “team captains” typically clamor for the best technical players…irrespective of whether those players are the best team players. I’ve too often heard managers tell me that they’d rather have good, rather than nice, when it comes to their team members.
I submit to you that “best player” includes being both good technically and ALSO good interpersonally. To borrow a theme from comedian Jeff Foxworthy:
• If you find that your project team members are the kind who like to sit alone, only interacting with other team members when they are coerced to do so…you might be an ineffective manager.
• If any of your project team members act like prima donnas (commonly now called “divas,” since ballet has gone out of vogue), who want special treatment, who don’t really feel that they need to work with others, and/or that others just should follow their leads rather than doing any thinking of their own…you might be an ineffective manager.
• If your project team meetings rapidly devolve into coffee klatches, where nobody really talks about the project, or nuclear winters, in which everybody heats up quickly to massive explosions of nasty and lethal radiation…you might be an ineffective manager.
If you seek out team members – assuming you have the luxury of being able to select the members of the team you’ll be leading, of course – who think their ideas are the only ones that matter, who think that all the other members of the team are there only to serve them, and/or who think that rudeness, offensiveness, and disrespectfulness of others is the way one gets one’s way, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that you’re likely to get the destructive behaviors that come from those attitudes. So, the solution to this is clear:
• Seek out team members who are both technically competent and who behave like rational, team-oriented people
• Shun potential team members who are either/both (a) arrogant jerks, no matter how technically competent they are and (b) technically incompetent
In the end, if your organization selects the people with the right attitudes and nurtures those already in the organization who have the right behaviors, you’ll find more success as a project manager (a manager in general, really). Of course, this will mean you need to understand what you want first, and also that you behave the best ways yourself…so get crackin’. Figure out what the attitudes you want are and then communicate that information widely. A rising tide floats all the boats, after all, and I’m sure you want the boats to all float.
