« Get Your Ducks in a Row »

Tel est le titre la session que Mark animera au PMI Global Congress qui se tient à Marseille du 7 au 9 Mai prochains.

Pour ceux qui n’auraient pas encore la chance de connaître Mark, voici sa mini bio en Anglais:

Mark E GRAY, Project Manager, SigmaPM – Vaubadon,  is involved as a volunteer at PMI and is president of the France-Atlantic chapter and is active in the Risk CoP knowledge team. Mark Gray is an experienced project manager with a background in engineering and projects from defense to semiconductors. Currently he is an independent trainer and consultant working with major clients around the world to develop project management competencies. He is an accomplished speaker at project management congresses and events with a dynamic style combining humor with hard facts to stimulate discussion. He holds an MBA, is a PMI certified Project Management Professional (PMP)^® and is a certified PRINCE2 practitioner who is researching knowledge in projects towards a PhD.

Getting your ducks in a row requires more than just putting some planks on either side; you need to have the right motivators and drivers in place. In this presentation we will get rid of the stick and look at selecting the right carrots for inspiring team performance.

Learning Objectives

• Gain a better view of what motivates people in organizations and projects and have some new ideas on what project managers can do to lead highly successful teams.

Getting teams to go in the right direction – and stay on track – is not easy.

Project managers (and organizations) have a tendency to put in place control systems that either don’t give team members the right direction or otherwise are so tight that they stifle creativity. Granted, some projects need tight controls, especially where human safety is involved, but most projects need more relaxed controls. In fact it can be argued that even mission-critical projects need flexibility to deal with the uncertainties. Take it one step further and we see the flip-side of the control mechanism – motivation. With Taylorism there was the belief that to create successful organizations you reward the behaviors you want and punish those you don’t. More recent thinking has brought forward the ideas of positive motivation and inspirational leadership as a better model and we ended up with the idea that the bigger the reward, the better the performance. However, research has shown that there is a significant flaw in this thinking; sometimes a bigger reward actually results in a reduction in productivity.

Getting your ducks in a row requires selecting the right kinds and levels of boundaries and drivers to channel the team energy; this requires a leadership approach that goes beyond traditional motivational approaches. This paper takes a look at what really motivates people to strive for success and how project managers can support the team with appropriate direction and control. The subject moves away from the traditional motivational theories of Taylor, Maslow, Herzberg and others, and draws on the writings of Lencioni, Pink and Maxwell for inspiration, in an effort to help project managers achieve that elusive “highly productive team environment” for projects.