“Getting the smartest people won’t necessarily help your project. People who can be participatory team players, accomplish goals and tasks, and have a common understanding are the ones that will mix,” he says.

Ziska cites the work of Daniel Goleman, author of the bestseller Emotional Intelligence, who estimates in his follow-up book, Working with Emotional Intelligence, that IQ accounts for only 4% to 25% of work performance, while emotional intelligence — a mix of self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills — accounts for 75% to 96% of performance.

Identifying the various personalities on your project team — especially those most likely to be disruptive to the project — can help you avoid thorny issues later on, says Ziska.

(Ziska also stresses the importance of understanding the life stages of project team members. See the sidebar “Motivating Team Members at Different Life Stages” for more on life stages.)

Motivating Team Members at Different Life Stages

Not only does each project team member possess a unique personality and work style, but each is likely at a different life stage as well. Successful project managers must be aware of the life stage of each team member in order to offer appropriate motivation, according to Ziska.

For example, newly married team members are often motivated to “bring home victories” to the new spouse. Bringing the team member’s spouse into the fold — through social events or other efforts — helps cement the idea that the team member is a valuable contributor.

“We have found that by engaging the spouse, we get more effective focus out of the employee. It definitely has a positive impact,” says Ziska.

Table 1 shows a variety of life stages with proven ideas for motivating employees at each stage.

Table 1

Knowing where your employees are in life helps you get the most out of them

Contributors and Inhibitors: Knowing the Difference

While every project team includes a range of personalities, Ziska says they can be boiled down to two main types identified by a variety of management theorists — contributors and inhibitors. Contributors are characterized by a willingness to help the team accomplish its goals without disrupting the project. The personality types of contributors include leaders, facilitators, silent contributors, followers, and even devil’s advocates – whose critical approach can improve the quality of the team’s work.

Inhibitors, on the other hand, are characterized by the inability to put the team’s goals ahead of their own. They are often critical or confrontational, self-centered or uncooperative. The four main personality types of inhibitors are aggressors, deceivers, passives, and self-destructives (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Defining the four main personality types of inhibitors

Inhibitors can be especially destructive to an SAP project because their behavior can be socially contagious. Ziska cites studies that have shown that product-testing focus groups respond more negatively to a product when the first person to speak criticizes the product. The same mentality can affect teams collaborating on SAP projects, so it is important for managers to understand the risks posed by inhibitor personalities, he says.

Project managers may not have the flexibility or time to avoid inhibitors when staffing the team. Fortunately, there are ways to manage difficult personalities in order to bring them in line, according to Ziska.

However, he draws a distinction between altering a team member’s psychology — which is not possible — and altering destructive behaviors.

“You’re not going to change an inhibitor into a contributor,” he says. “You can, however, minimize those behaviors and even use them to help your project.”

Ziska recommends a four-step process for dealing with difficult personality types.

Step 1. Build Self-Awareness

One of the key indicators of emotional intelligence is self-awareness — the ability to understand one’s own personality and behaviors. Project managers can help inhibitors build self-awareness in a variety of ways, says Ziska.

For example, Ziska says people have a tendency to model their own behavior after the praise they are given. Just as a child will clean his room more often if he overhears his mother tell a neighbor about what a tidy child he is, an aggressive personality on a project team can be conditioned to be more open to ideas if offered praise for doing exactly that.

“The person has to be aware of the behavior, and if he’s not, a little child psychology can help. If a person hears in a meeting that he or she is very good at working well with the team — even if it’s not true — you have a much better chance at changing their behavior,” says Ziska.

Of course there will be occasions when it becomes necessary to confront a team member about disruptive behavior. In those cases, Ziska says it usually best to handle discussions in private. And, he says, to come prepared.

“It helps to provide examples of their behavior from your observations. As a manager, you can tell them exactly what behaviors are inhibiting their success within the organization and use specific incidents to highlight those behaviors,” he says.

Dismissive or closed-minded team members can also be coached in what Ziska calls the “yes, and” technique, which Ziska borrowed from his improvisational comedy studies at the Second City theater in Chicago. Instead of rejecting or dismissing an idea outright, participants are taught to introduce other options by saying “yes, and” when presented with an idea they don’t like.

“If you just phrase your criticism in ‘yes, and’ terminology, you have a greater likelihood of people accepting your ideas and building on those ideas,” says Ziska. “With an inhibitor, you’re really just trying to make them aware of what the ‘No’ does to the group.”

He also encourages implementing systematic 360-degree feedback — in which team members critique each other — as long as the feedback itself is delivered anonymously via the project manager.

“People will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find out who said what. As a manager, that’s not important. What are important are trends. If a significant portion of your team says one member is detracting from the group, then you can use that to help the team member become self-aware,” says Ziska.

To avoid uncomfortable questions about the origin of a particular line of criticism, project managers can conduct anonymous surveys and aggregate the results.

“If you explain to people that you’re going to do that, they’re much more willing to give honest feedback,” says Ziska.

Step 2. Coach Self-Regulation

For many inhibitors, self-control is a difficult skill to grasp — even after they become aware of their own destructive behaviors. A steady diet of positive feedback from the project manager will help this process along.

“When people are losing weight or training for a marathon, it is important for them to frame their approach based on positive messages such as ‘I can run one more mile,’ or ‘I can lose another five pounds,’” says Ziska. “By focusing on positive steps taken by team members with difficult personalities, you can help them reinforce those behaviors.”

Step 3. Develop Empathy

Appreciating the views and input of your colleagues is a valuable skill for any team members. Those with difficulty empathizing can be coached through creative exercises that can even add valuable critical assessments to your project.

For example, by asking each team member to take turns playing the devil’s advocate — a questioner who prods aggressively against an idea or decision to point out possible flaws or weaknesses — the project manager can encourage team members to consider decisions through the eyes of others.

Ziska says this process is especially valuable for IT professionals, who may find themselves so wrapped up in an implementation that they lose sight of the business value of the project.

“When you’re implementing an SAP ERP system, it’s really about process efficiency and process consolidation. As IT people, we forget that somebody actually has to use the system we put in place. Part of the challenge is getting the project team to be empathetic about what these changes will mean to the users,” he says.

Encouraging open and honest discussions and leading role playing drills also help inhibitors to understand other points of view, according to Ziska.

Step 4. Boost Social Skills

Building personal skills such as empathy and self-awareness is important, but inhibitors must also be coached to boost their ability to work collaboratively with others. Ziska says there are proven techniques for encouraging the development of social skills.

Team-building exercises — from outdoor excursions to the famous trust falls — have long been a staple of organizational leadership. Ziska says the specific type of exercise matters less than the goal of breaking through the professional divides that keep team members from truly relating to one another.

“It doesn’t have to be an evening activity or team dinner, as long as it’s about the relationship. One of the exercises I like to do is to ask team members to split into groups of two and identify the best project they’ve worked on and the characteristics of that project that made it enjoyable. At the end of the exercise, the answer is always the same. People want to have fun. They want to be respected, they want to learn something, and they want to contribute,” says Ziska.

Seeing the commonality of responses from the group helps team members bond over shared interests, he says. Another good way to get team members to boost social skills and interaction is to host lunch-and-learns where members take turns instructing others in a particular area of expertise — whether that expertise is SAP-related or completely unrelated to the business (pottery making, kayaking, skydiving, etc.).

It is also important to reward successful teams, though Ziska cautions against relying too much on money as a motivator. People will leave well-paid jobs if they are not happy in the environment. Instead, he focuses on rewarding teams with what they asked for at the outset of the project — a congenial environment in which all team members were respected and contributed to the project.

Lunch or dinner meetings are a good place to engage team members in conversations that move beyond the professional environment — allowing them to bond on a personal level. Managers struggling to get the conversation going should come up with a few revealing questions (e.g., “What was your closest brush with death?” or “What was your first car?”) and allowing each member to answer it.

Strength in Diversity

These techniques will help managers encourage constructive behavior from their project teams, but Ziska cautions against overdoing it. A team of diverse personalities will help move a project along, but only if given the leeway to make the most of that diversity. Figure 2 shows a list of 10 lessons Ziska compiled, from a variety of references, for dealing with different personalities.

Figure 2

Managing a diverse team

“Many managers don’t realize that just because you do something a certain way, that’s not the only way to do it. Bad managers micromanage because they want everyone to do things the way they do. Good managers communicate the deliverables and rely on the team’s talents to deliver,” says Ziska.

Sources:

• “Project Lessons — Critical Lessons Learned from 327 Project Teams” – ProSci
• “Ten Commandments for Managing People,” by G.A. “Andy” Marken
• “Managing Groups and Teams/Conflict,” by Wikibooks

Davin Wilfrid

Davin Wilfrid was a writer and editor for SAPinsider and SAP Experts. He contributed case studies and research projects aimed at helping the SAP ecosystem get the most out of their existing technology investments.

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