PMcrunch

There is a simple and basic attitude that we, as leaders on our projects and programs, can adopt that will make all the difference in the world. That thing is the idea of engaging openly and creatively with our team members as opposed to either seeking constant agreement or taking an authoritarian stance. Let’s take a deeper look.

In our relationship with team members and in the relationships among team members as fostered by the culture of our team and within our organization, we have two choices:

1. Make agreement or consensus the priority.

2. Make candid, rigorous debate the priority.

The choice is ours and there are stark differences in approach and major differences in results based upon our choice.

The key to understanding this is to have a look at our personal need for others to agree with us. We can do this by noticing the tone we set in meetings. We can uncover this by noticing how we handle regular communications with others on our team. We can gain deeper understanding of this by noticing the over-all tone in communications throughout or organization.

The idea here is to assess what is the priority. If the priority is agreement and consensus, which by itself is not a bad thing, we must ensure that this agreement and consensus at least follows a commitment to possible candid and rigorous debate about the issues at hand. While on one hand we may wish to foster agreement and consensus, we need to make sure and not do it at the expense of the candid and rigorous debate that can provide the creativity, problem-solving, and open communications that are so healthy for our projects and for or teams.

It is important that we become aware of our tendencies in the areas of conflict and agreement. We need to be realistic with ourselves by assessing ourselves based upon our actual behaviour. Engagement through constructive conflict can be very healthy for our teams and we need to be extra aware of our role in facilitating this type of environment.

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John Reiling, PMP
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