Being a Coach of Yourself and Your Team Members

When discussing the role of a business coach, there is one thing that must be cleared up immediately. Your team is composed of all people depending on you for direction. Obviously the higher you are in the organisation, the deeper and wider your team will be.
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Selecting a Project Team

To be brutally honest, one of the worst first steps you can take to build a team is to say, “Any volunteers?” It is not that volunteering for a team project is bad per se. It is that the ones who volunteer may or may not be the best representatives to add to your team. Their motivations are right and their desire is strong, but do they have the right qualities to fit the project being developed?
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Being a Project Leader

The concept of control is often misunderstood, because for many people the word conjures up images of stern discipline and barked orders. But the fact is a project leader has a role which requires the ability to bring a successful project to conclusion through the careful use of control and governance.

Being a project leader has many challenges, and one of the most challenging is the ability to exercise control so that team members stay motivated while fulfilling their own roles. The old-fashioned manager barking orders is gone for the most part, and has been replaced with a leader using a skill set which promotes team member and project success.

Unifying Force

So what exactly does being a project leader involve? It involves a variety of duties and responsibilities with the leadership function serving as the unifying force. Controlling a project does not mean ordering people to do specific jobs. It means bringing human and other project resources together to create an efficient process for achieving specific goals.

Leadership is an umbrella function that encompasses the people, processes, systems and resources needed for the project to succeed. This complex and encompassing nature of the project leadership role means the leader must be prepared to deal with complicated and interrelated systems which operate in the larger organisational framework.

• Manage the human side of the human resources which often includes conflict resolution
• Manage the activities and processes which make up the critical path
• Develop a project plan which is then monitored and adjusted as circumstances require
• Adapt project schedule to keep project on track
• Develop and/or monitor project budgets
• Recruit team members as needed
• Deal with cross-functional matters including inter-departmental and inter-organisational
• Provide essential project reports
• Serve as liaison between project team and management/executive staff
• Manage supply of resources including handling scarce resources or changing needs
• Train team members

It is clear that being a project leader requires many different skills, but it is strategic application of skills which separates the good leader from the ineffective leader. Strategically planning, monitoring, and training require having a clear understanding of the project goals and being able to translate activities into planned results.

Participative Management

The application of control by a strategically minded project leader involves participative management. With authority and control comes a responsibility to exert power in a way that increases business competitiveness and success. Participative management enables team members to have regular input into the project with the understanding the project leader has the final authority.

Many times the organisation discovers project leaders need additional training in order to fulfil the many functions expected to be diligently handled. The truth is the project leader, unlike the team member or even the executive staff, must have a variety of skills to accomplish important tasks.

• Ability to manage job functions
• Ability to delegate
• Ability to communicate
• Ability to make strategic decisions
• Ability to manage conflict
• Ability to serve as a liaison between team and those outside the team

Providing the necessary training to be a team leader is the first step to take towards insuring the leader has the variety of skills to handle the job the way it should be handled. The benefits will extend far beyond the project team itself. The benefits will go to the organisation as a whole as the successful project management leads to increased competitiveness, profit and success.

Being A Mentor

Being a mentor is an extremely responsible role to take on, but it can also be very rewarding. It provides a way to put your own knowledge and experience to good use in helping other people to make improvements in their own lives; personal or professional.

Mentoring has been a very popular role in society in general and is a form of leadership that is certainly beneficial within business circles. One of the most important items to remember is that a mentor does not have to be a senior member of staff helping a more junior member. While employees aren’t likely to mentor senior staff members it is true that people on the same level as each other can be of assistance in this way if both parties are agreeable.

This is one of the most important things to remember if you are thinking of becoming a mentor yourself – both people need to voluntarily take part in a mentoring situation. It doesn’t matter how enthusiastic you are when it comes to wanting to mentor someone else whom you think you could help; if they are not willing to give it a try then it is unlikely you will be able to persuade them otherwise. In this situation you should simply let them know you are there and ready to help should they change their mind.

If you are thinking about becoming a mentor you need to have several qualities to really be successful at it.

The first one – and perhaps the most important – is the ability to maintain a bond of trust with the person you are mentoring. Regular meetings and get togethers will help to establish a good relationship between you and the other person and it is essential that everything which is spoken about during the time you spend together discussing whatever is necessary is kept completely private. This is the only way mentoring will work successfully.

You will also need to have the ability to listen without judging the other person. It may be that they are having trouble focusing at work and their performance has slipped as a result. In this case you would need to listen to their problems and offer advice on possible solutions without berating them for their bad performance. If they have decided to take part in the mentoring program then they have already taken a huge step in the right direction.

Although the role of a mentor entails helping one person at a time, it can also have a huge effect on team performance. The more motivated and pro-active team member, who is benefiting from having a mentor, will gain enough from the experience to enhance and improve their working performance which in turn affects the other people they work with.

By being a mentor you are offering people a chance to improve their working lives without punishing them in the process. As a pro-active and positive way of helping people, mentoring has a lot to commend it.

How To Create a Motivating Environment

Being higher up in any organisation brings with it extra responsibilities and the requirement to oversee team members in various ways.

Many people see this as an opportunity to make sure the work gets done in the best way possible, but being an effective leader isn’t just about the responsibility you have to the work or the goal. It’s also about the responsibility you have to the people who work with you in your team, since by creating the best possible environment for them to work in will encourage better results from them and a better sense of teamwork all round.

However motivating others can be much easier said than done – indeed it is almost impossible to motivate someone who is demotivated. There aren’t too many people who enjoy getting up and going to work in the mornings, which means that you need to ensure the experience they have when they get to work is a positive one – one that will help them to achieve better results and be more pro-active in getting things done.

Therefore it’s important to recognize that in order capture your team members’ motivation you have to create a good working relationship with them. In other words you have to create a motivating environment for them to work in. If you walk into a room full of people you have never met before, they won’t automatically respond to your efforts to motivate them, no matter how hard you try. You have to foster a good relationship first, and that relationship should be a two way effort. If people feel that they can go to their team leader and talk to them about a problem or concern with some aspect of their work, then you are likely to achieve far better results with your team than you would if you were to maintain a distance from them.

Setting goals with individual employees and with the team or department as a whole can go a long way towards creating a successful motivating environment as well. Having an end goal in mind helps to focus the mind, so long as it is achievable and stretches people in some way. In line with this, clear communication of expectations can also provide the structure people need to feel secure in the work they are delivering.

Effective feedback is another way to motivate people towards better results in the future, even if they have recently failed to achieve a goal of some kind. In this situation it can be up to you to turn that situation around and turn it into something positive. While it is essential that you maintain your position of authority, you should also ensure you are accessible to your team members, as this can make a huge difference to how any particular project or task turns out.

As such, being approachable and a role model can play a big part in how successfully you can capture your team’s motivation. If you adopt a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ approach, you are not going to get the best results. You should have just as much interest in your team members as you do in the work itself, since one is very much connected to the other.

By educating yourself on how you can connect with your team members in a more constructive way – and by valuing their own input as much as your own – you will soon notice an improved sense of motivation through your whole team.