In my career, I have had the pleasure of working on several good and one great project team. For the purpose of this answer, I will define a great project team as a team that is able to achieve results which significantly exceed initial expectations (along the dimensions of quality and/or cost of output). This list is meant to capture only the necessary ingredients and is not meant to be comprehensive.
1. Strong skills
It is impossible to build a great team without great individuals. The people on the team need to have very strong functional skills which allows the rest of the team to completely trust them in their area of expertise. If someone on the team is not pulling their weight, it has a significant effect on the morale of the rest of the team since they are not sure if their efforts are going to result in good outcomes. So, investing time into finding the right individuals for a project is a very high leverage activity for the project lead.
In addition to functional skills, it is also great to find folks who are passionate about the work that they do. In my observation, passion for work usually translates into a strong sense of ownership since such people care deeply about the outcome and are not just looking for a fat paycheck. This results in people filling gaps as needed and fulfilling responsibilities that haven’t explicitly been assigned to them.
2. Sufficient communication and collaboration
When it comes to team work, one common misconception is that more communication is always good. The level of communication required is usually a function of the maturity of the team and clarity around roles. A team that has shared history and trust among team members will require very little communication in achieving the goals. We see this consistently with great sporting teams where the same core group of players know how to win having played so much together. This is also the reason why companies undertake massive internal re-organization efforts to minimize communication and coordination cost among teams. The hidden cost of communication can create significant overhead if not managed correctly.
As an extension to that, collaboration should also happen on an as-needed basis and at different levels. The team members should come together to solve issues that cannot be solved by an individual alone or require different perspectives. There should be very little need to pull in all team members or the project lead to make local decisions. For instance, if there is a decision to be made about an implementation detail that affects design and engineering, then the designer and engineer should get together and make the decision (if they cannot come to a decision, then the project lead can be pulled in). In effect, this means the project lead has created an environment where the individuals feel empowered to make these decisions which is a great indicator of trust levels in the team.
3. Great leadership
As mentioned earlier, good teams need clarity on goals and roles. This is where leadership comes into the picture. The role of the leader changes with the stage of the project. Most projects can be broken down into two phases – formulation and execution.
In the formulation phase, the role of the leader is to clearly define the goals and non-goals (with help from others as needed), communicate them clearly, get buy-in from stakeholders (including project team) and come up with a plan of action. If this all sounds very boring and obvious, that’s because it is. But still a lot of projects suffer due to not getting the basics right. When dealing with conflicts around goals/plan of action, project leads sometimes kick the can down the road in the hope that the issue can be resolved later with more information. Sometimes this is the right thing to do. But this can be perceived as lack of decisiveness/reluctance to say no to a certain course of action. For leaders, the key in these situations is to communicate their thought process instead of just communicating the end result of the decision tree in their head. This is an important part of building trust. The major takeaway here is that team members should feel comfortable trusting the leader even if they do not agree with all their decisions.
In the execution phase, the leader moves into more of a supporting role allowing the rest of the team to operate efficiently. In other words, the role should be more strategic and less tactical. This usually involves figuring out next steps, working with external stakeholders and unblocking the team as needed. To me, if a leader is too involved in day-to-day execution, it means one or more of the following:
- The leader doesn’t trust the team (related to earlier point about local decisions)
- The team is not mature enough to operate without adult supervision (in which case it may be necessary for leader to be more involved)
- The team lacks clarity on how to proceed (related to the formulation phase)
To be clear, a leader should always be aware of how things are going but there are ways to achieve that without being involved in all the details. In my observation, the biggest reason for leaders being very hands-on, given a mature team, is how they view the relationship between accountability and decision-making. Bad leaders equate the two i.e. if I am accountable, I need to be making all the decisions. On the other hand, great leaders empower others to make decisions and are happy to be held accountable for those decisions.
In general, a good litmus test for good leadership is whether you want to work with this person in your next project/team/company. This usually captures the two things that people want – being successful and being valued. So, a leader who is able to achieve good results and can also make people enjoy coming to work is worth their weight in gold. (Side note: The reverse litmus test can used by leaders to find people to work for them – whether you would be willing to hire this person on your next project/team/company)
To summarize, projects can fail or succeed due to a variety of reasons and starting with a good team is one way to mitigate risk. Getting a group of people to work together to achieve something is always a challenge. But when done well, it can be very rewarding and inspiring. Good luck!