One thing above all can make leadership easier: an enthusiastic team. When your team wants to roll its sleeves up, get going, and do their job, then leadership becomes an exercise in pointing your team in the right direction, and providing them with the resources they need, to succeed.
But you will often need to earn this kind of enthusiasm. So, let’s consider some things you can do to bring it about.
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Here are my Top 10 Ways to Create an Enthusiastic Team
Planning
It is easy to believe you have a monopoly on wisdom and foresight when it comes to planning. You don’t. There are three compelling reasons to involve team members in planning:
- Together, you have greater collective wisdom than any one of you alone.
- Involving people in the planning process is a recognition of their experience, knowledge, and judgment – which is highly motivating.
- When team members are involved in planning, they become more committed to the plan. They have a reputational stake in making it work.
Scheduling
Far too often, scheduling starts from an assumed 100 percent availability. Not only does this store up a whole series of awkward negotiations for the future, but it is demoralizing for team members to see their other commitments implicitly devalued to zero at the stroke of a pen or cursor. A better approach is to consult them at the start on availability and work from these. That way, people will commit wholly to their scheduled availability and you’ll have a far more enthusiastic team.
Progress
Progress is motivating; it is as simple as that. So, make progress visible. Put plenty of milestones in your plan, publish progress reports frequently (or better: give people direct access to real-time progress data), and celebrate successful achievements at any opportunity.
Stretching
Give people an opportunity to grow and develop when they work on your team. There are two dimensions you can stretch people in:
- skills, and
- responsibilities.
The chance to learn new things and to strengthen existing skills towards mastery is intrinsically motivating as well as good for careers and therefore for employers. Opportunities to take on more responsibility grow character and judgment. And they also craft an enthusiastic team.
Trusting
If you are going to stretch someone and delegate good quality, demanding work: do so whole-heartedly. When you give people responsibility, you must trust them fully and let them stand or fall on their own performance. By all means, put in scheduled reports and certainly be available for consultation, but the time to get nervous about the risk is before you decide what to delegate, and to whom. Once you have made your decision, trust is essential if you want to maintain enthusiasm.
Communication
Nothing stifles enthusiasm more than the feeling of not knowing what is going on, what is expected of me, and what the future holds. Create effective communication channels and take responsibility not just for communicating well yourself, but also for building a culture of good, collaborative team communication among team members. Done well, this leads to spontaneous collaboration, seamless conflict resolution, and real caring between colleagues. And those are fundamental to your enthusiastic team.
Environment
Keep your team motivated by becoming a human environment control mechanism. Like any environmental controller, use feedback to constantly adjust the levels of support and challenge, and to feed in resources when they are needed. And don’t forget to remove unwanted heat and contaminants from your team before they stifle enthusiasm and productivity.
Fizzing Bombs
Problems build up and, just like the fizzing bombs in Tom and Jerry, if you don’t tackle them quickly, they will explode in your face. Not only does this hurt you and anyone around you, but it also looks weak to your team, and creates a climate of “what next?” fear. A positive willingness to take on issues rapidly and make confident decisions will create the confidence in your leadership that motivates followers.
Brilliance
People want to follow leaders. So be the leader whom people want to follow. Define your leadership template and build a style that feels right to you and creates the culture you want. What will your leadership watchwords be? And how hard are you prepared to work to make them a day-to-day reality; even on the toughest of days? How much work will you put into building an enthusiastic team?
Endorsement
Your enthusiastic team will work hard for you. What will you give them in return? There is no need for elaborate gifts and bonuses: their role in motivation is exaggerated by the people who have become accustomed to them. Fundamentally, people need to feel endorsed for their efforts. A three-step process works well:
- Recognize their contribution – and help them to learn valuable lessons from their experience
- Reward their efforts – with something as simple as your praise and thanks
- Celebrate their successes – by recognizing them in front of their peers
Here is the most important thing, though. Do not save all of your feedback, praise, and opportunities to learn from experience to the end of the work. Build it into the regular cycle of progress checks and support. This way, you can harvest its benefits throughout the life of your team.
Recommended Videos to Help Build an Enthusiastic Team
Carefully curated video recommendations for you:
- Top 7 Leadership Tools and Methods for Team and Project Leaders | Video
- The Single Best Team Effectiveness Tool | Video
- Real Project Team: What Will You Do to Create One? | Video
- 10 Ways to Say Thank You to Your Team | Video
- Team Refresh: 10 Ways to Give New Life to a Tired Team | Video
- Build High-Performing Project Teams – Conversation with Charles Vivian
- Project Team Leadership: 5 Tips for Leading Your Project Team | Video
Recommended articles for a More Enthusiastic Team
- What You Need to Know about Building a Great Project Team
- Effective Teamwork: Do You Know How to Make it Happen?
- Performance Feedback: How to Turbo-Charge Your Project Team Members
- Project Team Burnout: Do You Know How to Prevent Employee Burnout?
- Project Team Motivation [Everything You Need to Know]
- Managing Remote Teams: How to Meet the Challenges
- How to Spot and Deal with Stress in Your Team
- How to Get the Best from Your Project Team with Situational Leadership
- Ten Ways to Win Team Commitment on Your Project
- Boost Your Project Team Performance with these Hacks
What Kit does a Project Manager Need?
I asked Project Managers in a couple of forums what material things you need to have, to do your job as a Project Manager. They responded magnificently. I compiled their answers into a Kit list. I added my own.
Check out the Kit a Project Manager needs
Note that the links are affiliated.
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For more of our videos in themed collections, join our Free Academy of Project Management.
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