Team dynamics for Entrepreneurs and project managers

It you are a project manager or an Entrepreneur and you are building a team, managing team dynamics of the can be quite interesting as well as frustratating. You are never given the ideal team for a project, therefore your role is to identify skills/personalities missing from project, and either try to attain them, or fill in these gaps by yourself through developing the team. On top of all this you need to focus the team on the goal/objective of the project. You need to also wear all these hats:

• Leader
• People Management
• Negotiation
• Stakeholder Management
• Conflict Management

You need to be both a manager and a leader; there is a subtle but, essential difference:

Manager: A manger gets people to do things.
Leader: A leader gets people to “WANT” to do things.

It is important that there is no ambiguity with roles and responsibilities as these leads to tasks falling between cracks, and lack of accountability.

You need to lead and manage the group through the following 5 stages:

Group development by Bruce Tuckman, 5 Stages

1. Forming: The team meets and learns about the opportunity and challenges, and then agrees on goals and begins to tackle the tasks. Team members tend to behave quite independently.
2. Storming: The team addresses issues such as what problems they are really supposed to solve, how they will function independently and together and what leadership model they will accept.
3. Norming: During this phase, team members begin to trust each other. Motivation increases as the team gets more acquainted with the project
4. Performing: By this time they are motivated and knowledgeable. The team members are now competent, autonomous and able to handle the decision-making process without supervision
5. Adjourning: Also called deforming and mourning. At this stage the project is near the end and relationships then to fragment.

Know what phase you are in and adapt behaviour accordingly, also know when to move to the next stage.

I hope sharing my experience and knowledge is useful, now you can have your cake and eat it.