By Lonnie Pacelli

Are your project team members confused about who is responsible for what aspects of the job? Do their conversations and meetings usually end in heated personal attacks? Or do individual members ever exhibit an "every person for themselves" attitude and refuse to help their teammates? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you're not alone. Sometimes, a team simply doesn't gel.

Every experienced project manager experiences challenges in getting his or her teams to behave like… well, teams. But with organization and guidance, you can help your project teams accomplish more and can eliminate many of the setbacks and challenges that make teamwork so difficult. Consider the following five strategies for unifying and organizing your teams:

1. Establish a project organization with clearly defined roles  

   Project organization must go beyond a hierarchy chart. All team members need to know what function they play on the team, how they fit into the other functions, and what happens if they don't do their job.

   Depending on your industry or functional discipline, you may employ standard or customary roles on your project. Start with these standard roles that are typical for your type of projects. But if the particular project need warrants a special role that is outside the standard, then create a special role. And if the project doesn't need a particular standard role, then eliminate it. This may sound easy enough, but many project managers hesitate to deviate from standard roles. At the end of the day, however, results are what matter the most, not how well a team adhered to the standard project-role structure.

   If the project is unique or the environment doesn't have standard or customary project roles, take a more pragmatic approach to role definition. Identify three to six aspects of the project that are most important or that pose the most risk. Create roles that encompass the concern or risk areas. Then ensure that all major roles are defined correctly by crosschecking the roles with the work that needs to be completed.

   This type of project organization addresses concerns or areas of risk head-on by defining a role with a singular point of accountability, which manages the areas of your project that are most likely to fail. By doing this, you'll sleep better when you know that the most crucial areas are covered.

2. Eliminate finger-pointing and public fights  

   Every team project will likely involve lively discussions. Often, these discussions lead you one step closer to project completion. But when they get out of control, these discussions lead to finger-pointing and fighting. Be deliberate in letting these discussions take place and in letting team members question each other, but put a few rules in place to maintain a level of civility.

   Allow team members to challenge and stretch, but when a decision is made, everyone must stand behind it as a team. What happens in the room stays in the room; outside the room, the team remains unified. This means no gossiping or badmouthing a team member to outsiders. Also, wrong decisions must be accepted as a team. In other words, no finger-pointing allowed. And finally, don't allow problems to become personal. Focus on problems, not on people.

   Inevitably, some rules will be broken. However, you should still strive to set some ground rules to avoid team strife whenever possible.

3. Develop a "rallying cry" to focus the team  

   You can look at any major successful advertising campaign and see the messages that embody them. Consider these classic examples: "Where's the beef?" "Got milk?" and "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz." Each of these unifying messages can be associated with a product. Similarly, when driving a project it helps the team to embody some kind of rallying cry or mantra.

   Your team's message should incorporate aspects of the project. For example, say your team needs to be cautious not to overdesign a solution to keep costs down. In this case, you might start using a "good enough" rallying cry during the design phase that serves as a continual reminder not to overdo the solution. Aside from helping to keep the project within bounds, the rallying cry will also help unify the team.

4. Hold team members accountable for delivery  

   With project teams, all members need to clearly understand what they need to do, when they need to have it done, and how their work fits into the big picture. Everyone needs to realize that the team members are accountable not only to the project manager but also to each other. After all, if one person fails, the whole team fails. Therefore, each individual team member must know what everyone else's role is.

   Each team member should be aware of his or her own role as well as what is happening in other members' roles, which ensures that every member knows how he or she and others fit into various aspects of the project. Everyone should realize that if a member fails to meet a deadline or doesn't perform his or her role adequately, that member is letting down the team as a whole, not just the project manager. Meeting or missing deadlines and deliverables is a team issue and should be exposed to the entire team. The point here is accountability. All members need to feel accountable for their work and need to experience the joy of success as well as the discomfort of failure.

5. Celebrate victories as a team  

   Driving through a project is tough work, and people can easily get discouraged when the team faces roadblocks or setbacks. Therefore, celebration of key milestones is important to keep morale up and the momentum going. These celebrations don't have to be extravagant; they can be as simple as ordering a pizza or bringing in a cake — anything that allows the team members to let their hair down and take a bit of a breather. However, too much celebration can lessen the impact of the success and may actually annoy the team members. So celebrate — but do it in moderation.

Teamwork in the future

A well-structured project team means all team members understand their role in making the project successful. Every team member knows what they need to contribute to the project, when they have to perform, what other project team members are doing on the project, and what it takes to be successful. Just as important, each of the team members helps one another to ensure overall project success. When you use these five strategies to unify and organize your teams, you can overcome the common teamwork challenges and make all your future projects more successful.

About the author   Lonnie Pacelli is a business owner, consultant, and author with more than 20 years of experience as an executive, project manager, developer, tester, analyst, trainer, and business owner. He is author of The Project Management Advisor: 18 Major Project Screw-ups, and How to Cut Them Off at the Pass (Prentice Hall, 2004).