Why Teams?

Teams are formed because they can achieve far more than their individual members can on their own, and while being part of a high-performing team can be fun, it can take patience and professionalism to get to that stage.

Effective team leaders can accelerate that process and reduce the difficulties that team members experience by understanding what they need to do as their team moves through the stages from forming to storming, norming and, finally, performing.

Project team building for any project is the most important and challenging step. Most Project team building likely, the project manager will require skills from different departments/jobs to achieve the goals of the project.

An effective project team leader is a "social architect". One who understands the interaction of organizational and behavioral variables, can foster a climate of active participation and can minimize dysfunctional conflict. To be effective, the team leader must identify major issues associated with three dimensions.

• The first dimension is the project organization structure, including organizational development, and senior management involvement to ensure visibility, resource availability and overall support for the project throughout its lifecycle.
• The second is team related with emphasis on behavioral aspects such as team structure, trust and respect, or conversely, barriers to team development.
• The third is project task and resource related such as goals and objectives, planning and scope management, scheduling and cost control. These are all accomplished through effective communication.

But what of the other essential ingredient, the team, the followers? Ideally, the more the team can be motivated and empowered to "take the bull by the horns", the more productive they become and the less direction and control is required.

Tip: Project leadership is an ability to get things done well through others. It requires: - Vision of the destination - Compelling reason to get there - Realistic timetable - Capacity to attract a willing team

It is clear that leadership is important to the success of a project because leadership is essentially about motivating people. It is also clear that what may be characterized as “managership” is equally important because this is about getting things done. The Project Manager is responsible for everything that is required to make the project a success - whether directly or indirectly.

It is not like a typical hierarchical line management role. The PM should have the skills, knowledge, and personality necessary to bring the project to fruition. In addition to these traits, the PM must be given the level of responsibility and authority necessary to perform the job.

The PM's actual role depends on the structure of his/her organization, which can be function-oriented, project-oriented, or some type of matrix in between. In a heavily project-oriented organization, the PM may have relatively unlimited authority, answering only to upper management. At the other end of the spectrum is an organization that manages by function. The PM must deal with functional managers as equals, or possibly even superiors, and negotiate for resources. Most organizations fall somewhere in between these two extremes. Through the efforts of the Project Management Institute (“PMI”), an understanding of the importance of "people" to the success of a project has developed rapidly over the last several years. The major thrusts are perhaps best portrayed graphically as shown in figure:

With these attributes in mind, the following definition is a simple, yet comprehensive distillation of leadership thought in the project context.