How did these problems occur!
This is Part 2 of a 3 part story about a team that was initially working together well and then began to have problems that were impacting the team members and the outcome of their initiative. In Part I we provided background information, in Part II we will discuss why the team was having the problems they were having and in our final part, Part III, we will discuss the resolution to the problems to get the team back on track.
When Jack began to do a bit of thinking about the situation, he recalled a few important occurrences on the team over the last couple of weeks, that, at the time, he didn’t think too much about:
- 3 additional members joined the team all of whom were located in different offices.
- The consultant Jack hired just started work with the team.
- The scope of the project changed significantly – adding more objectives to the project but with an attempt to keep the timeline the same.
- The project sponsor changed because someone on the leadership team left the organization.
Jack also realized that he didn’t spend much time with the team when all of this incurred and now he is wondering if maybe he should have stepped back in to be more a part of the team and help them deal with what were significant changes in a very short time period.
Jack learns and/or realizes the following after talking to a few colleagues and some of the key stakeholders with whom he has a good relationship:
- A colleague tells Jack that the consultant he hired had worked with a few of the team members in the past and the relationship between the consultant and those team members was not a good one. Jack realized he never bothered to introduce the consultant to the team prior to hiring him.
- While he knew the 3 new team members were joining the team, he never bothered to take the time to introduce them to the current team members nor to consider that a team that was co-located may have difficulty effectively “absorbing” into the fold new members who were not co-located with them. He forgot about the importance of the stages of team development! Another colleague mentioned that she had heard the team was shocked that they didn’t have a “heads up” about new members coming on to the team and rather these 3 members just introduced themselves via email to the team and, in the words of one of Jack’s initial team members, "invited themselves to a team meeting and requested a conference line be arranged."
- When the project scope was changed (due to a new project sponsor on the project), rather than taking the time to meet with the team face-to-face to explain the new scope and introduce the new sponsor, Jack simply sent an email to the team notifying them about the additional objectives to be accomplished and letting them know that a new sponsor is in charge of the project. One of the key stakeholders said that he had heard from the sponsor that the sponsor was surprised not to have been personally introduced to the team to discuss the project. The sponsor actually reached out to the team directly, bypassing Jack, to set up a meeting to talk about the project.
Jack realized he had a number of issues to correct; and quickly if he was going to move this project forward! He also realized many of the problems he was seeing on the team were due to the team no longer feeling engaged and motivated about this project.
Part III will talk about the steps Jack took to correct the problems with the team.