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Emotionally Intelligent
Project Teams
Susan de la Vergne
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Nowhere in an organization is sensational or terrible teamwork more
evident than on projects. Of course, teamwork matters in many areas of
business, where teams perform critical operational duties and ongoing
support functions that depend, to varying degrees, on healthy teams in
collaborative relationships.
But what sets project teams apart is that they are temporary,
interdependent and cross-functional, incorporating several different
professional disciplines. There’s the added complexity, with growing
frequency, that teams are multi-national and often spread across geography
and time zones. Trying to make all that gel in the time the team is
together is a challenge.
The success of a project depends in large measures on the success of these
temporary, far-flung, multi-discipline teams. A dysfunctional project team
practically guarantees cost overruns and schedule delays and can even
result in a project being cancelled altogether—an expensive and damaging
last resort.
What’s the difference between teams that sail or fail? One answer is
whether the team is, unto itself, “emotionally intelligent.” Do they
handle adversity well—as a team? Do they know themselves? Can they depend
on each other? Do they have a shared reputation? Do they share an esprit
de corps? Those are the critical elements of team emotional intelligence
(team EI).
Emotional intelligence is the hard science of soft skills, built on a
physiological understanding of the brain chemistry behind emotional
behavior. First appearing as a term and a concept in the 1920s, it was
popularized 70 years later by Daniel Goleman, whose books Emotional
Intelligence and Working with Emotional Intelligence, brought
the topic into range for readers from many walks of life, especially
professionals working in complex organizations who recognized the
phenomenon right away.
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The Negotiation
Mentor
Tips from Preston Michie
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Don’t Move Until You Know What the Other Side Wants
I’ve seen negotiations where the other side sometimes tries to handle both
sides of the negotiation. The conversation goes something like this: “I
know I’m asking $3,000, but I’m offering to sell you the pickup for
$2,000. I know you wanted the engine repaired, but I just can’t do that. I
would consider fixing the brakes.”
Not only did the Seller bargain against himself in this example (never do
that), but Buyer would have paid him $2,500 for the truck and not asked to
fix the brakes. Buyer didn’t know the engine needed work. By making
assumptions about Buyer before asking, Seller unnecessarily handed Buyer
valuable information that cost Seller money.
People wrongly assume that the other side is thinking about things the
same way you are. I call this the “Mirror Image Assumption,” which is the
assumption that the Buyer is after exactly what the Seller is selling.
This isn’t always the case, even for cars.
A few years ago I was moving during an extremely rainy winter to a new
country home with mud for a yard. I needed a four wheel drive pickup truck
to deal with the mud.
The seller of a highly used 1986 Ford 250 with a 460 V-8 engine, concerned
about bad gas mileage given recent severe increases in gas prices (the
truck gets about 7 miles per gallon pulling a trailer), emphasized the
truck’s other features—AC, extended cab, full size bed, etc. I couldn’t
have cared less.
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Negotiations seminars:
http://www.auxiliumtraining.com/ContNeg.htm
Why Can’t We all Get Along in Our
Organization?
Chris
Sheesley
Why, after all of the polished mission
statements and codes of conduct hanging on office walls, do
employees in organizations still have difficulties working together
without discord? This article discusses the rationale used by professional
conflict resolvers and restates the question, “Why we can’t we just get
along?”, to the more appropriate question, “What does it take to learn to
get along?”
As a professional mediator and facilitator, I often encounter clients who
hope that I might work with them to help them devise agreements to improve
damaged relationships. The outcome for which they are striving is a more
congenial atmosphere in which employees are able to focus on their work.
These clients are often surprised to discover that these conflict
management sessions dredge up hard feelings and seem to create tensions.
Unfortunately, one cannot have conflict resolution without the presence of
some conflict.
We have to be prepared to explore the problems in order to
ferret out the sources of conflict and create lasting solutions as a
result of what is discovered within the soupy mess of discord. This stands
in contrast to the more traditional—and less effective—approach of
making managerial decrees about how staff should work together.
Most people naturally prefer to work in low conflict environments. In
professional conflict management interventions, the overarching goal is to
help feuding staff learn how to work together to get to that more
comfortable state of collaboration. The conflict resolver’s secret is that
to get to this point, it is often necessary to help people see why they
have failed to arrive at lasting solutions before. The act of negotiating
through these problems and creating their own solutions builds the trust
and good will necessary for good working relationships in the face of
historically damaging conflict. A corollary benefit is that staff learns
how to resolve future problems more amicably after working through their
toughest issues with a professional mediator.
While it may seem ironic that conflict resolution efforts sometimes
increase the level of tension, this is a temporary effect that emerges as
the root sources are examined. In deep rooted disputes, only this
difficult, emotionally intensive work can clear the way for better working
relationships.
Project News: Updates for Executives
Susan de la Vergne
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Audience
Whether there are executives in front of you live and in person or you’re
addressing them only on paper, it’s always important to keep in mind the
special circumstances of talking to (or writing to) executives. This is
what professionals in communications refer to as considering your
audience.
Yes, executives are busy running from meeting to meeting, but more
importantly their brains are usually busy and crowded. The best execs are
good at compartmentalizing—for example, giving you their complete
attention while they’re with you and moving on to give the next guy
complete attention ten minutes later. The best execs are also good at
sizing things up quickly, being helpful now, asking focused
questions, giving direction and input, and disclosing relevant
information.
The Challenge
It’s a significant challenge: to draw busy execs with overcrowded brains
into your project for the time you have their attention, get to the
relevant point(s) right away at the right level, get what the project
needs and let them move on.
To meet the challenge, you have to be concise, topical, and interesting.
You don’t want to be historical (“And then last week what happened was
…”), chatty, or steeped in trivia (“Now turn to the last page, that one
item near the bottom…”).
You should also think ahead of time what you want from the exec whose
attention you hope you have, what you want your update, meeting, or report
to accomplish—e.g., approval, roadblock removal, guidance/direction—and of what specifically.
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