This week on Instagram, I’ve been talking about all the different dimensions of how your experience as a higher education professional managing, supervising, and supporting high-performing teams is very transferable to project management. Let’s recap and then dive right in!
First things first… you know by now that I’m going to open by encouraging you to map your efforts to the value they create.
I think talking teams is a really good opportunity to clarify that this does not mean that the work you do supporting teams does not have inherent value. It does! On some level, we should be doing the work to motivate and support high-performing teams because everyone who works with us deserves to feel valued and supported as employees and human beings.
That said, it is helpful (though not always necessary) to articulate this value directly and explicitly to hiring managers, who may not have this inherent value at the tops of their heads.
Which is to say, circling back, as we always do… you are selling yourself short if you stop at describing development for development’s sake
So – what can you do here?
Defining Value
Well, first things first, let’s clarify – when I say “defining value”, I don’t always mean that we need to land on a specific number, or that the value needs to be financial. It’s certainly sometimes possible to assign a dollar amount to the work that you did — for example, economic value added is a valuation quant metric that basically says that project should return financial value above what we spent to achieve them.
But (and you can imagine how fun I was as a classmate in my MBA, right?) economic value added is not always straightforward. For one thing, not all rates of return can be measured financially. No one would argue against providing professional development for employees rotating in and out of their project teams (see process #5, above), for example. We’ve all benefited from professional development. We know when greenlighting professional development for others, based on our own lived experience, that our teams will benefit from this professional development. Yet most of us would be at a complete loss to quantify, in dollars, the return on investment. It doesn’t matter — even though anecdote is not data, we still greenlight the professional development. Because there are some things we know, even if we can’t quantify them: it makes financial sense to provide benefits that make employees happy and increase retention, because attrition is expensive. It makes financial sense to provide benefits that increase skills, because efficient employees complete projects quickly and with higher accuracy.
Notice what we’re doing and what we’re not doing here, when we’re building our case for professional development:
- What we’re not doing: claiming to be able to calculate a specific rate of return. “This workshop will cost my team $200. After completing it, they’ll be able to give me $200 more dollars than before. How could I resist a 100% return on investment!!!!!!” Sounds ridiculous, right? It is. So we’re not going to claim that.
- What we are doing: citing very specific behaviors that solve very specific problems. “This workshop will strengthen my employees’ skillset, leading to faster project completion times — which, in time, I might be able to measure, once I’ve got more data. In the meantime it will also lead to increased job satisfaction, which decreases turnover and in turn decreases expenses associated with frequent hiring, onboarding, and training.”
So, while we can’t always answer the question “how much”, it’s very often enough to answer the question of “how”.
Operationalizing Teamwork
Now that we’ve talked a little about defining value, let’s operationalize teamwork – that might be all you need by itself! The PMBOK defines five core processes that make teams “work”:
- Vision & Objectives
- Roles & Responsibilities
- Operations
- Guidance
- Growth
Here’s the secret: as a project manager, it’s important to understand that you will be managing project teams made up of folks you may or may not supervise – which makes some of these areas murky. Ultimately, you are accountable to the project itself, to the project’s sponsor, and to the project’s stakeholders, which means that it is both 1) to your advantage and 2) your responsibility to make sure that those five processes are humming smoothly along – even when the folks on your team are not your direct reports.
As you can probably imagine, all five of these areas can start to melt down a little in the hands of a project manager without great interpersonal skills. For example – what if not everyone agrees at the project’s outset how to prioritize objectives… and then resources contract and some tough decisions have to be made? What if a team member starts performing poorly and needs some real guidance, but they don’t want to hear it and definitely not from you you’re not my boss anyway why do we even have a project manager your whole job is just sending emails isn’t it? (Am I speaking from experience? Maybe. Let’s leave it at: sometimes you need a tough skin to be a project manager.)
What this means for you: you have interpersonal skills out the wazoo. You may have an advanced degree that supports them. You definitely have a career history that supports them. So let’s zoom back out for a moment and start thinking: based on everything you know about teamwork, how might you start answering the question of “how”?
Sometimes, it’s helpful to start in the negative. What happens if we don’t have someone overseeing vision/objectives, roles/responsibilities, operations, guidance, and growth?
People start fighting over how to prioritize project outcomes — especially when resources are tight. People step on each others’ toes, not knowing whose job is what. People have no idea how to do their jobs, even if they can agree on what they’re supposed to be doing, and they definitely don’t know how to get better at them. Hot mess express.
And then we can contrast: what happens when we hop off the hot mess express? Specifically, behaviorally?
- Team members are more likely to 1) spot an an issue and 2) speak up to avert it before it becomes a crisis when we’ve provided growth opportunities to facilitate their ability and fostered a culture of collaboration.
- Team members are more likely to have learned something in outside professional development that they can bring back to the team for increased effectiveness or productivity. Sometimes this can even result in new products or services being offered.
In both of the above examples, it’s hard-to-impossible (especially early on) to calculate a return on investment… but it’s very possible to articulate them. And often, that is enough when it comes to defining value for soft skills!
Your mission
Your teams mission moving forward, then — though you can apply this to any soft skills you’re highlighting — is two-fold. First, comb your background for all things team. What’s your highlight reel? When you think back to the great teams you’ve led, what specific processes led you there? Next, operationalize, operationalize, operationalize. When you’re describing this highlight reel:
- What specific behaviors did the team display? How did they talk to each other? How did they interact? How were they trained?
- What would have resulted if they did not do those things?
- What resulted because they did do those things?
If you can be truly specific about answering those three questions… congratulations! You did it! You defined value! 🙂
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