Friction exists in almost any interaction between human beings. There may be misunderstandings, conflicts, personality clashes, or petty jealousies. Project managers must be prepared to deal with all of these. In fact, if you dislike having to deal with the behavioral problems that arise on project teams, you should ask yourself whether you really want to manage projects at all. It’s a given that this will be part of the project manager’s responsibilities, just as it really is with any management role. Like it or not, the behavioral problems come with the job, and failure to deal with them may sink a project.
Many personality clashes are the result of a lack of good interpersonal skills. People have never been taught how to sit down and work out differences with others, so when the inevitable conflict happens, it just blows up. The best way to minimize the impact of such problems is to provide training for all team members (including yourself) in interpersonal skills. This area has been sorely neglected in many organizations because there seems to be no bottom-line impact. It is hard to prove that there will be a $10 return on a $1 training investment.
Because of their inability to quantify the benefits, companies don’t do the training. Yet if they have capital resources that don’t work well, they will spend whatever is necessary to correct the problem. Interestingly, a company’s human resources are the only ones that are renewable almost indefinitely, but companies fail to take steps to keep them functioning effectively. As a project manager, you owe it to yourself to manage this aspect of the job.
So how do you go about doing this? You may not actually have the opportunity to schedule training for yourself and your team prior to the project – in fact, I can probably guarantee that you won’t. That’s perfect world talk and relying on your organization to make sure everyone will be well trained in this area will leave you old and grey before it ever happens.
It’s likely that you will have to take matters into your own hands. They key for me has been to do some minimal training – really more like ‘discussions’ – on the need for good interpersonal interactions on the team and to instill the concept with the team members that conflict will definitely exist. Then we discuss ways to work with each other in a cooperative manner to get through the conflicts that we know will be faced. In effect, we’re laying some early ground rules to follow. What those ground rules are will depend upon you, your management style, and the chemistry of your team, but definitely have the early discussions – it can pay off big in the long run.
The information for this article was derived, in part, from a section of James Lewis’ book entitled, “Fundamentals of Project Management.”