Another lovely lovely book.
A good project manager is proactive not reactive.
What does that mean. He does have total responsibility for ensuring that every detail is done properly. He doesn't micromanage people, and therefor it requires a whole lot of proactivity for him to ensure results. He doesn't just wait till the deadline to ask, if the task is done. But throughout the project he follows-up, checks, if the people are able to meet the deadlines in time. Then, if there's is a problem, he spots it in time to still do something about it.
He would never knowingly set them up for failure. It is important that he plans for the team small wins and enables them to meet the objectives, so people are motivated. He should also remove any obstacles that might stay in a way of his team members.
They key is to make people want to work on the project not just comply they will do the work. Because than they will do just the bare minimum, but we will not create a high performance team.
And how do you make people to want to do sth. You focus on their motivations, their interest and what they want to achieve. And if you help them do that, they will be commited. It can be however better if people at least comply, if you can't get them commited.
Of course sooner or later we will have a conflict in a team, no matter their commitment. In the book there are 4 potential sources of conflicts.
And they are in an order. It is rare that real relationship conflict appear. A lot of times there is a problem above that causes it.
If we're not set on the goals/objectives/vision, conflict will probably arise. It is just a matter of time till that gets personal, if we don't deal with the true cause.
To find the cause we ask first: "Do we agree on the goals?" if yes, we move to another level: "Do we agree on the roles and responsibilities?" than "Do we agree on Procedures?". Only if we are sure none of these cause the conflict do we ask if the cause is in a relationships.
Sometimes a problem member isn't performing as needed. There are again more possible causes.
There we might employe situation leadership, depending on the combination of those 2 cause we may choose 4 different approaches.
Don't mindread
When dealing with a employe we shall never mindread, "I don't like you attitude" or "You aren't motivated to do the task" is just one of the worst thing we can say. Instead we shall describe the behavior and what the affect of that behavior were, so they get a chance to change it.
Writing this it really get to me, that the hardest part by far, is turning theory into a skill. We can read all the books but if we don't aply them what difference does it make? And it is freakish hard to do that. But also exiting :)
