The highest performing teams are interdependent, co-committed, agile, grounded in trust, and empowered. Just as projects nest within broader programs, project teams often nest within a broader organization with project sponsors or steering committees to help guide them. Those sponsors’ intent is an essential part of the team’s direction. Their perspective helps the project working team put everything they do in context.
In solving problems, making important, complex choices, and working together in general, the highest performing teams:
- Cooperate and collaborate, leveraging diverse perspectives to achieve a shared purpose/intent.
- Share current best thinking and invest in perspective-taking.
- Engage in dialogue marked by active-listening to ratchet up each other’s current best thinking in pursuit of shared purpose/intent.
Let’s unpack that:
Intent: Beginning with the end in mind – the purpose and intent. Purpose and intent get at why what the team is doing matters and its impact on others.
Cooperation and collaboration are closely related with subtle differences as described by Bud and Jacobson in Conversations Lead To Consensus:
- Cooperation: Mutual support and willingness to work towards common objectives, balancing own and others’ needs, valuing and supporting each other’s strengths, roles, and responsibilities. Requires trust and respect.
- Collaboration: Actively engage all in discussions and decision-making processes. Embrace others’ strengths and weaknesses, understand their perspective to foster innovative thinking and creativity.
Current best thinking is the best one person or a group can do on its own, explicitly inviting others to add their knowledge and perspective to ratchet it up to a new “current best” level.
Perspective-taking: Understand and consider another person’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences by viewing a situation from their point of view.
- Cognitive: Thoughts, beliefs, intentions
- Affective: Emotions, feelings
- Perceptual: Visual, auditory experiences
Dialogue: Cooperative and two-way. Per David Angel, four types of conversation:
Active listening: Hearing, understanding, processing
- Hearing: A passive or physiological act
- Listening: Hearing and actively focusing on what is heard and interpreting it
- Active listening: Hearing, listening, engaging in conversation, building on what others say – paraphrasing, summarizing, asking for clarification, perspective-taking
Sponsors and Steering Committee’s Help
The role of project team sponsors or steering committee is similar to that of a board of directors. They need to find the right balance of governance and oversight on the one hand, and providing advice and counsel on the other – “Noses in. Hands out.”
The sponsors’ intent goes to governance and oversight. It’s a critical element of the team’s direction. This should be part of the team’s charter and used as a touchstone along way.
The sponsors’ perspective puts the intent in context upfront and should be leveraged by the working team on an ongoing basis as they adjust their plans and tactics along the way.
It’s important to be clear on the difference between direction to be followed and input to be considered in line with the fundamentals of the art of delegation:
- Inspiring Direction: Objectives/desired results/context/intent – what and why
- Enabling Resources: Financial, information, technical or operational, people, time
- Empowering Authority to make mission tactical decisions within strategic and operational boundaries/guidelines/intent
- Credible Accountability and consequences (standards of performance, time expectations, positive and negative consequences of success and failure)
As discussed above, intent goes to governance and oversight and is direction to be followed. Sponsor’s perspective on context is valuable input to be considered along the way.
Implications for you
If you’re working with others to solve problems or make important, complex choices, do cooperate and collaborate with real dialogue marked by active listening so you can take in others’ perspective – especially your sponsor’s intent and their perspective on context.
If you’re supporting teams, know the difference in your own roles, clarifying your direction to be followed and providing input to be considered. Clarify your intent and use it as a touchstone for governance and oversight. Almost by definition, your perspective on the context is broader than that of working project teams. It’s certainly different. Help them keep their work in context.
Net, “context” and “intent” can serve as simple framework for discussions between sponsors and teams. Teams should ask sponsors if they have any perspective on the context and if they are comfortable that the work is progressing in line with their intent throughout the project timeline.
