Team Formation, Team Management, and Project Leadership

Leadership takes place in the living order. Management takes place in the geometric order.

  - John Nelson, PE – Chief Technical Officer, Global Infrastructure Asset Management

Adjunct Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison



Objectives

After reading this lesson, you will be able to

  • List advantages of teams and strong leadership
  • Discuss the role of trust in building a team, and describe behaviors that help build trust
  • List motivators and demotivators that can affect a team’s effectiveness
  • Explain issues related to managing transitions on a team
  • Explain the role of self-organizing teams in Agile
  • Describe the advantages of diverse teams and provide some suggestions for managing them
  • Discuss the special challenges of virtual teams


The Big Ideas in this Lesson

  • Building trust is key to creating an effective team. Reliable promising, emotional intelligence, realistic expectations, and good communication all help team members learn to rely on each other.
  • The most effective project managers focus on building collaborative teams, rather than teams that require constant direction from management.
  • Teams made up of diverse members are more creative, and better at processing information and coming up with innovative solutions. Organizations with a diverse workforce are significantly more profitable than organizations a homogeneous workforce.

Source: Jeffrey Russell, Wayne Pferdehirt, and John Nelson, https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/technicalpm/chapter/team-formation-team-management-and-project-leadership/
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Back to '4.3: Building a Great Team'