Jump Start Your Project Team
November 2006

You’re on a mission critical deadline and your team is experiencing one or more of these scenarios:

-    Everyone wants input on everything
-    There’s a large number of “decision makers” vying for control
-    You can’t have an honest conversation about the people who are S-L-O-W
-    One of the leaders is actively encouraging disillusionment in the project
-    Missing deadlines is having a domino effect on everyone’s effectiveness

Been there? Done that? Of course you have. If you used your inspiring take-charge leadership capabilities to rally the team to record breaking success and personal fulfillment, read no further. You are a rare specimen and will never have trouble finding your next career opportunity! Everyone else: try this bold step by step approach and fine tune your capabilities.

1. Ask your boss and/or someone who is a masterful project manager and people-person to spend a couple of hours in a room with you and a white board.
2. Spill your guts about all of your frustrations, perceptions, judgments and concerns about the project.  Be as irreverent as necessary with your “truth” behind closed doors.
3. Identify the short list of what’s not negotiable with your project.  Schedule? Quality? Budget?  Create a short statement of your required outcome and put it on the far right end of your white board.
4. Plan backwards and identify the big ticket milestones on your critical path, placing them sequentially with dates along a horizontal line from end date to today.
5. Identify one name who is the solo decision maker for all of your milestones and add these names to each milestone.
6. Identify who has what input at the various points along your schedule and add this information to your plan.
7. Talk about any of the players who are potential showstoppers and identify what coaching, support, accountability or tough love is needed to bring out their best performance.
8. Ask your boss or mentor to give you input on “your leadership lesson” that this team is inadvertently drawing out of you.  Be ruthless with your own learning.
9. Decide upon a sequence of meetings to announce and implement your new Jump Start Plan to the team. Include personal sessions with key people to avoid embarrassing anyone, or to stack the deck with support from your top talent.
10. Take your white board drawing and turn it into a visual presentation that clearly identifies the ultimate outcome that’s not negotiable, the primary milestones and due dates, the decision makers, and the opportunities to refine the plan as needed.
11. Get everyone in the room to present your Jump Start Plan and lay out what you are asking of people.  Discuss what’s at stake, the extra effort you’re asking for, resources needed, and how much you love them – whatever you need to say to get their attention that the game is changing.  And do all of this with total sincerity and commitment to what everyone really cares about anyway – being a successful high performing team.
12. During the next 48 hours look for any signs of grumbling and immediately engage the issue and coach the person to support the team and the project in a manner that illuminates their own best interests.  Inspire them with tough love and the opportunity to experience excellence like never before.
13. At every opportunity acknowledge people for their successes and coach them through their challenges.  Direct the team as often as necessary to ensure success.
14. When it’s over have a huge celebration and reward them in a way that makes them smile and look forward to the next time you call a special Jump Start session.

Sometimes inner wisdom is subtle and gentle. Other times it’s a wake up call with a two by four. Each situation and each team needs different medicine. Your job is to understand that whatever is needed can be delivered with compassion – including a change in role for someone who is not able to perform their role effectively. In fact, it’s actually a cruel disservice to leave someone in a position they are not well suited for. Your reluctance to make a change that will help the team, only gives people two things to complain about and you’re one of them. But it doesn’t have to be that way if you’re honest with yourself and others from the outset.

Our favorite personal success story did not involve anyone losing their position – only their point of view! It involved a satellite test and integration team that had a competitive need to reduce their process time drastically from a best ever 31 weeks. The big meeting included over 40 professionals who “knew” it couldn’t be done – to the degree that one participant publicly called out LionHeart for wasting the $50K plus dollars the meeting was costing the company. But the project manager stood for the new plan, challenged his team to a new level of excellence and said we facilitated a tough conversation in “the right way” And the result was a new best ever of 19 weeks, new sales of over $200M to that client, and a competitive edge over the company they’d been losing business to.

Do you have a team that needs an infusion of positive energy? Whether your savings will be measured in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions, it’s the spirit of excellence that is most important. That’s the enduring benefit that can become the foundation of your company’s ongoing sustainability. But someone needs to administer the medicine, whether subtle or strong.

Are you the leader who needs to step up? If so, we’ll provide you with a free assessment of what’s possible and what it will take to have your breakthrough. Call us at 503 632 8572.