Communicating about tasks, roles and responsibilities takes up a great deal of time for most project managers.  After communicating, a project manager documents and tracks task assignments in a project plan.  So everybody has something to do, and the plan forward is clear to all.  But how do you translate those task assignments into a real sense of ownership by individual team members?  How do you make sure that each member of the project team feels accountable for the project’s success, not just the project manager?

In his book Team Troubleshooter: How to Find and Fix Team Problems, Dr. Robert Barner says teams that are struggling with accountability issues often display the following symptoms:

A Focus on Activities, Not Results: Who among us doesn’t relish the idea of updating a project plan to show that a task or even a sub-project is complete?  But are these completed tasks actually accomplishing anything except improving the project’s “percent complete” column?  As Barner says “activity-based evaluations can easily fool teams into believing they’re making valuable organizational contributions when their employers are actually deriving little from their activities”.  As project managers, we must ensure our project teams focus on the end results, not the task victories, in order to provide real value to our organizations. 

Lack of Direction or Motivation: Project team members who are working from a comprehensive project plan which is reviewed and updated frequently should be well aware of the direction of the project.  But motivation is another story.  A project plan can contain thousands of tasks that team members diligently plod through.  But are they aware of the results of their efforts? 

“It’s hard to stay interested in a game if you can’t tell the score.  Team members who are trying to function without solid measurement systems are often unmotivated and apathetic.  Well-designed scorecards help team members focus on the most important work activities” Barner advises. 

So if your team is struggling with accountability issues, think about what you are using to report project progress.  You may find that the standard project reporting is too broad and diffuse to be able to inspire your team members.  You may need to tie milestone information to another metric within your organization, like costs, usage, time to market or customer feedback, in order to keep your team’s “eyes on the prize” and ensure that your team understands their contributions to the larger organization. 

Difficulty Recovering From and Analyzing Setbacks:  Risk management is a huge part of project management, and many of us have seen a team devastated by an unanticipated or under-anticipated risk.  This is particularly challenging for teams that have made risk management a priority through frequent reviews of risk events, their probabilities and impacts, and who have invested the time in creating and maintaining project risk artifacts. 

“Even the best teams encounter occasional performance setbacks.  When faced with reversals, teams with reliable scorecards in place are able to put the situation in perspective by reminding themselves of the steady improvement they’ve made over the long run”, Barner reports.

This is where a mid-project Lessons Learned session becomes valuable.  When your team suffers a setback, use those risk documents to get a realistic view on what went wrong.  Bring your group together to discuss what went wrong, what went right and how to do it better in the future.  Learn from it and then move on. 

Henry David Thoreau said “Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”  From a project manager’s perspective, this means sharing accountability with your team by focusing on business, not just busyness!