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The role of narrative in team alignment in a large
capital project environment
By
Dawn Fiander-McCann
A thesis presented to INSEAD Executive Education in fulfillment of the thesis requirement for an
Executive Master in Consulting and Coaching for Change (CCC Wave 13)
December 2013
Dawn Fiander-McCann
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AUTHOR’S DECLARATION
I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public.
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Abstract Project managers can easily manipulate metrics to highlight success. What project managers cannot easily do, however, is measure and report the degree to which their teams are aligned or emotionally connected. Stakeholders increasingly know there are less measurable yet significant soft contributors to project success. Narratives can serve to align leaders with team members to build integral business relationships. However, integrating people alignment and emotional intelligence (EI) measures is still too ambiguous for many project managers. This thesis discovers that a leader’s capacity to be Other-centric is persistently undervalued or misunderstood in projects but is integral to establishing a common understanding of a project’s priority. Misunderstanding and a lack of trust frequently translate into valuable time wasted on a project, which affects cost and schedule. This thesis builds a business case for the importance of narrative as an approach to alignment to achieve project delivery excellence.
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Acknowledgements For almost two years, I have been privileged to share a unique academic and safe space — both on and off the INSEAD campus — with my CCC Wave 13 colleagues who shared willingly and vulnerably their personal and professional experiences. The detail and level of access to such rich, raw content, I have never before experienced and, perhaps may never experience again. I am eternally grateful. It is with immense gratitude that I acknowledge the great knowledge and support of Elizabeth (Liz) Florent-Treacy in inspiring me to write the good enough thesis. I also wish to express a deep thanks to Claire Wilkshire, my editor, who supported me through two major thesis transformations and led me to this final version. Claire’s edits and questions gave the work momentum. Much appreciation and thanks to my business partner, Sandra MacGillivray who has embraced CCC’s content been a fantastic supporter of the value of CCC at our company, Valency. Roger Lehman is a man whose insightful and consistent approaches to leadership I can only hope to emulate one day. To me, Roger embodies CCC and I will forever be grateful for his contribution to my psychodynamic lenses. Erik Van de Loo’s calming influence inspires me to take pause and listen: a skill which allowed me to achieve great richness of content with my thesis contributors. Thank you, Erik. Sharing Fontainebleau walks from campus with Piret Haahr helped me see CCC content through her realistic and no-nonsense eyes. I adore her perspective and miss having it more consistently. My husband Dan knows how important the CCC journey is to my ability to consult and coach today and tomorrow. I am forever grateful to him for taking the Paris job and allowing me the luxury of this INSEAD masters. Evan and Leah have always inspired me to be the best person I could be. Even when they didn’t understand what Mom was doing, they were always supportive of me being offline for a few days every couple of months. I appreciate their willingness to be open to Mom’s changes. It is with immense gratitude that I acknowledge my five thesis contributors. You allowed yourselves to be poked and prodded without throwing me out of your offices or Skype chats. You were willing to let a stranger pick apart your leadership style. This could not have been very comfortable. Finally, a huge thanks to Manfred Kets de Vries who had the courage and insight to architect and inspire this most useful and inspirational masters degree. I am eternally grateful.
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Dedication
To Dan, Evan and Leah, you are my life!
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Table of Contents
AUTHOR’S DECLARATION ................................................................................. ii Abstract ............................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................ iv Dedication ............................................................................................................. v
List of Figures ....................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 Research aims and objectives .......................................................................................... 4
Methodology ...................................................................................................................................... 5 Literature review .............................................................................................................................. 8
Frameworks and concepts ........................................................................................................................ 8 Data gathering and analysis ....................................................................................................... 9
Analysis ............................................................................................................................................................... 9 Project leader profile ................................................................................................................................. 10 Approach and environment ................................................................................................................... 11
How the subjects were chosen ......................................................................................................................... 11 The project environment’s influence on narrative ................................................. 12
Does a contingent workforce influence the project narrative? .................................. 15 Organizational culture and its influence on the project leader’s narrative ........... 17
Project balance of individual and collective emotional needs ............................................. 18 The Narrators .................................................................................................................................. 21
Jerome Pasteur ............................................................................................................................................ 21 Samuel Fredricks ........................................................................................................................................ 24 Renée Townsend ........................................................................................................................................ 26 Lena Bryan ..................................................................................................................................................... 28 Major General Joseph (Bud) A. Ahearn .......................................................................................... 29
The Other .......................................................................................................................................... 33 Key attributes of leadership narrative to engage the Other .................................................. 34
Team building, alignment, and performance ..................................................................... 37 An emotionally intelligent approach to team alignment ................................................ 38 Creating a team identity for alignment ............................................................................................... 40 The importance of spending time ...................................................................................................................... 41
Conclusion: Project leader narratives create safe places to build team alignment ................................................................................................................................ 42 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 48
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List of Figures Word Cloud: Narrative Transcript of Bud Ahearn……………………….28 Table 1: Listen, Align, Collaborate………………………………………..36
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Introduction Running large capital projects is a complex business. It involves a significant
outlay of money over a finite period: as much as ten billion dollars, for example,
over three to five years. Also, multiple parties are involved. Large multinational
companies (such as Shell and joint venture partners such as Conoco Philips and
Total) form temporary companies to build industrial plants, mines, and
infrastructure projects. A single project can bring together as many different
company business cards around the table as there are people. These project-
specific companies can be challenging communications environments as project
stakeholders assume their respective roles.
Communications challenges translate directly into project risks that can lead to
significant cost overruns. In the study “Effective Project Management of Oil &
Gas Projects: A Model for Oil Sands' SAGD Plants,” Alnoor Halari (Halari, 2010)
cites the largest of the top 30 project challenges: “communication between and
within engineering/procurement/construction teams.”
First impressions are lasting impressions, and how an individual feels when he or
she engages with a project team is a key determinant of success. Few project
managers and executive stakeholders focus on increasing opportunities for
communication and collaboration on project teams and team building as a means
to mitigate risk. Given that teams are less often co-located and more often virtual
than ever before, fewer opportunities exist for essential relationships to develop
naturally. Business relationships have to be deliberate. Project leadership is
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increasingly aware of the need to have meaningful business relationships, but
many engineering project managers struggle to build the ties and allied culture
needed to deliver tangible results in tight time frames. Trust is a neglected
attribute: there is simply very little time in which to build trust.
Narratives are among the most natural, organic ways that people connect to
develop mutual goals and align for the purpose of delivering the project.
Narratives are stories team members share about themselves as they enter a
project:
Humans need two things in life: Food and stories. We cannot live without
either of them.
(Gianpiero Petriglieri, from CCC Module 8)
However, there is the conundrum. A cultural conflict exists. The financial
pressures of the capital markets can easily drive project managers to betray the
needs of the individual for the appearance of project progress. How can project
leaders create a fertile ground for relationships, given that the project ramp-up
period is usually compressed? Is it possible to prescribe meaningful relationship
alignment in the project planning cycle? Where email, phone, and Skype
conversations are increasingly the norm, are compromises being made that
negatively affect the project, when contributors cannot naturally share their
narratives?
Can narrative accelerate team cohesion? How does narrative help the individual
evolve from being an incoming singleton on the team to finding a defined role?
Team members use narrative to connect with other members of their team and
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with other stakeholders; this communication can provide insight into the
expertise, or even the weaknesses, of individual contributors, which may affect a
project. The content of the “project entry narrative,” once deconstructed, can
demonstrate an individual’s capacity for emotional intelligence and give a project
leader insight into skill level or behaviour valency1. Because narratives shed light
on who people are (and not necessarily how they will fulfill their roles), this is a
delicate and important moment in a person’s introduction. These narratives
create the first — and possibly lasting — impressions of professional suitability
for tasks they will perform and the overall role they will assume.
Is the project narrative crucial and, if so, can it be manipulated to serve a specific
purpose? Can stories be used as a tool — is there a framework for their use on a
project that can be instructed? What are some of the common attributes of the
narrative that can ease relationship tension and support the project’s
development? This thesis discovers common leadership approaches used to
build successful project teams. These narrative patterns build a business case for
an Other-centric approach to team alignment.
Dr. Quy Huy Nguyen’s research in collective emotions and Herminia Ibarra’s
research on identity as narrative are particularly relevant to individuals and teams
in megaproject environments. As individuals move from their current roles
(project or non-project) to project roles that may last only two to five years, they
display specific patterns of emotions and behaviours. Even though many seek
1 Valency is a tendency toward a certain behaviour based on situational characteristics.
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out these project roles, they are often not prepared for the emotions they feel as
they engage on a project. The role of the project leader, therefore, in the
formation of the team, at the project onset, is crucial to the culture of the team
and the project. However, tying the leader’s role to overall metrics for project
success is not possible, given the scope of this thesis. Measuring the success of
an industrial project is as complex as the project itself, as there are a variety of
indicators such as cost, schedule, health and safety, and quality, which can
report success (Zhang & Fan, 2013). For this reason I have chosen to align what
I term project success with my leader’s interpretation of success. This approach
is influenced by the growing body of construction industry knowledge that reports
success in emotional relationships as a foundational, contributing, attribute to
overall industrial project success (Ammeter & Dukerich, 1998; Zhang & Fan
2013; Merrow, 2011; CII Team, 1999; CII Team, 2009).
Research aims and objectives For the purposes of this study and to avoid confusion, I will use to the word
project throughout this thesis to mean any size or type of capital project where
there is a finite scope and delivery schedule involving multiple contract entities,
owners, and third party regulators.
In keeping with construction and project-focused research findings, and to avoid
confusion, I have chosen to not distinguish among the impacts of small ($100
million CDN), medium (between $100 million CDN and $1 billion CDN), and large
capital projects (over $1 billion CDN) on the development of narrative. Either the
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project size was not relevant to the themes developed here, or insufficient
research existed to make this distinction at the time of writing.
Methodology Team dynamics in megaprojects differ from those of traditional owner
organizations because megaprojects are staffed by a combination of owners and
their respective joint venture partners. This is the complex environment I sought
to explore by looking at the project onset, where a project leader’s influence —
through his or her own stories — can positively or negatively affect the team.
In projects, the narrative has a business need: it calls immediate attention to the
individual’s perceived capacity to deliver, but the intent of the narrative remains to
build a relationship — for purposes of project alignment — regardless of the
project’s size or duration. To understand the use of narrative as a means of
connecting with direct reports and teams, I chose an approach that would provide
a qualitative analysis of leaders’ behaviour as they shared their narratives. Could
any patterns in these behaviours represent indicators of success, failure, or
struggle in business relationships — as reported by my thesis contributors? Lisa
Ehrich (2005) explains the value of a qualitative, phenomenological approach:
The traditional or classical view of management maintains that
management is a rational set of activities that sees managers perform
functions such as plan, lead, organise and control (Mukhi, Hampton &
Barnwell, 1988) yet, as de Santo and Moss (2004) suggest, research over
the last forty decades has revealed the picture is more messy and
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complex than this. Management, like leadership, is a highly complex
interpersonal and relational activity that is very much concerned with the
development of the human side of the enterprise (Ehrich & Knight, 1998).
For this reason, phenomenological methodology, whose concern is to
shed light upon the meanings of human experience, could be used
effectively to explore a range of human experiences within management.
(Ehrich, 2005)
In deconstructing the content of the narrative using a psychodynamic approach, I
was able to observe my contributors’ emotional responses to building business
relationships. The leaders’ narratives emerged from this fertile ground. I
discovered through the course of the interviews that this qualitative format
afforded the leaders the luxury of taking tangents, which offered insights into a
deeper dimension of analysis than a structured interview and rating scheme
might have provided. This deliberate lack of structure allowed me to explore how
leaders saw themselves in their role. In particular, I was surprised by the intensity
of personal responsibility four out of five of the leaders felt for the well-being of
their team members. They personally needed to develop a safe place for the
people who reported to them — a place in which the narrative of the Other could
emerge.
Even though there is a business purpose to forming a project team, the leader’s
informal sharing of narrative allowed me to see what the team relationships
meant to them as people. The stories, therefore, were not constricted by
business oversight or judgment. A freeform approach, where there were no
expectations of right or wrong answers, allowed for experience sharing. This
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provided additional insight into sources of feelings and the closest representation
of how one-on-one conversations occur on a capital project.
I recognize that this thesis cannot gauge the success of a project, nor is the
research comprehensive enough to gauge whether or not each team is
successful. The thesis, therefore, analyzes how the leaders themselves felt their
teams were forming. A phenomenological exploration provides an opportunity to
use a psychodynamic analysis to observe and construct a back story. In parallel,
I was able to explore important indicators:
• What were the leaders’ feelings, emotions, fantasies, or ideas about how
they were using narrative?
• Were these leaders drawing premature conclusions about team members
based on the Other’s story? Why or why not?
• How did their background, that is, the leaders’ family history and
experiences, influence their narratives or their acquisition of the Other’s
narrative? Did these factors also influence their ability or willingness to
acquire the Other’s narrative?
• Were they able to create the reflective space necessary to develop
individual and team bonds in spite of a time- and budget-constrained
project?
• What was the intent of the leaders’ narratives? To understand the team
culture or to deliver project deliverables? Or both?
• What was the level of empathy for their team members?
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• Did they reframe the Other’s story to relate to themselves and establish
meaningful bonds and commonality?
These indicators can be measured only subjectively. To reduce bias in my own
analysis, I sought out contributors with whom I had no prior personal or business
relationship. This approach made it easier for me to come to conclusions that
were not influenced by any personal history I would have had with my
contributors.
Literature review
Frameworks and concepts I distinguish between individual narratives on capital projects and those used in
traditional organizational settings, and I was not able to find literature that
recognizes and explores this distinction. While some research exists, I was
unable to find work that specifically explores narrative and role development
within projects.
The available literature focused either on lessons learned in a megaproject
environment or the study of team dynamics as they relate to team-building in
geographically distributed organizations. Even though the behavioural or team
issues are important, there was no detail from a psychodynamic perspective.
Engineering project managers in a capital project environment represent one
segment of the potential audience for this project. Therefore, I am pursuing a
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lessons-learned framework. For example, I asked my interviewees why they
approached their team relationships in this manner. I asked how their own past
experiences, personal and professional, influenced their approach and narrative
content.
Data gathering and analysis To contain my thesis topic to the exploration of the informal narrative and its use
for building teams, I focused exclusively on project leaders. Project leaders are at
the forefront of team building on a capital project and they have a tremendous
amount of influence in their teams. Projects move staff consistently, and often the
leader is the relationship hub for staff. By ensuring I had no prior personal or
business relationship with my thesis contributors, I benefited from a degree of
distance from my contributors.
Analysis The original intent of the thesis was to deconstruct each narrative from a
psychodynamic and cognitive-organizational perspective. In acquiring each
contributor’s narrative and leaving my conclusions to emerge based entirely on
the patterns I saw in the interviews, I found that a project leader’s narrative is not
necessarily contained by one format or purpose. The purpose of the narrative is
directly influenced by the context provided by the Other’s responses. A parallel
can be drawn in event cycles, similar to leader-follower events in sports coaching
where the coach changes his approach to leadership based on the Other’s
responses (Eberly, Johnson, Hernandez, Avolio, 2013).
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Each contributor needed feedback on who the Other was. The analysis shifted
slightly from the role of the leader’s narrative — which I had assumed to have a
defined scope — to the role of narrative as a means of forming bonds to facilitate
collaboration. The stories were both given (by the leader) and collected (from the
Other). Leaders manipulate their narratives to achieve their business goals on a
foundation of personal story exchanges.
Other than sharing my thesis proposal with participants, I gave a very general
idea of what the intent of the work was. I had no premature conclusion in mind. I
was looking for patterns in narrative content that I could deconstruct from a
psychoanalytic perspective. I searched my network for colleagues of colleagues
willing to share the stories about themselves as they led projects and formed
teams. My assumption was that there is focused intent in a project leader’s
narrative. Leaders tell stories for a purpose, but what is also happening for the
leader? What drives his or her story? What else could influence the content of the
story? A project’s time and budget constraints have what sort of impact on
building leader-follower relationships?
Project leader profile
There were five contributors. Contributor profiles varied in age, sex, and
nationality.
• Four contributors were between the ages of 35 and 55. The fifth
contributor was 78.
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• Two were women; three were men.
• One was English, one was Lebanese, two were Canadian, and one was
American.
Approach and environment Each contributor was interviewed for a minimum of one hour. Most interviews
lasted two hours. These were in-person (2), via Skype (2), or on the telephone
(1). I recorded and transcribed all five interviews. In each case, as part of the
process and to show my appreciation, I shared transcripts and scheduled a
follow-up discussion. I explained how I would use the interview content in the
thesis. In four of the five cases, feedback was positive and the participants felt
they had learned something about themselves. The remaining participant was
neutral and wanted to correct grammar in the transcript.
How the subjects were chosen All contributors were willing to be recorded and to have their narratives
deconstructed through both clinical and organizational lenses. All were willing to
explore how they themselves engage, not only at the organizational, formal level
but also at the psychodynamic level, for example,
• What were their feelings and emotions when they engaged staff?
• What were their personal and professional goals as they engaged with the
project?
• Were feelings shared or kept private?
• Why or why not?
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• How did their role and project narrative description change when they
described it to peers and other team members, as compared to family and
friends?
• How do they judge (or not judge) other project narratives? What roles do
the narratives of others play in the formation of teams?
• What are their theories about narratives and their impact on teams?
The project environment’s influence on narrative Projects represent a unique economic and temporal dynamic and context for
narratives. If a project is not constrained by timed deliverables, then why should it
be undertaken in the first place (Merrow, 2011)? Projects not under such time
and economic constraints could be carried out within the organization and not
measured separately under capital spend. Capital spend is under investor
scrutiny, which further adds to the project’s pressure-cooker culture.
The project leader is under a tremendous amount of pressure to develop delivery
teams quickly. His or her behaviour is a key predictor of a high-performing team
(Ammeter & Dukerich, 1998). Among the leader behaviour characteristics cited in
the Construction Industry Institute’s (CII) “Identifying Success Factors for High
Performance Project Teams” is the characteristic “Gained the trust of team
members” (Ammeter & Dukerich, 1998). Developing trusting relationships takes
time, which is contradictory to the schedule constraints of a project. Time spent to
build trust is not a universally respected project metric. Any time commitment to
building team trust is overshadowed by an on-time, on-budget message to
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stakeholders and, more importantly, shareholders. In fact, many project teams do
not report themselves as high performing unless they meet these quantifiable
measurements (Ammeter & Dukerich, 1998). Organizations and projects have
different immediate goals (Levinson, 2009). A project is unique in this context
because its goals are under the scrutiny of multiple parties, who frequently have
different financial priorities.
A project is simply a fit-for-purpose organization. Team alignment relies on the
project leader’s organizational and interpersonal skills. The leader’s narrative is
used to build relationships as he or she builds the team.
In setting the organizational context for project narratives and their role in a
capital project environment, we must also distinguish projects from traditional
brick and mortar organizations. The project pressure cooker affects the tone and
intensity of the narrative, and the leader is challenged to create the narrative that
delivers the best team-building result. The following key differentiating
characteristics form a contextual wrapper for the project narrative:
1) Overall project economic stability. Although projects strive for economic
stability, they can be highly volatile and subject to sudden changes
(Merrow, 2011).
2) Roles change throughout the project’s lifecycle. The movement from
planning to design to execution to construction to owner handover can see
a project engineer lead many teams composed of changing members in a
time frame as short as two years.
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3) Project organization of origin. The organization of origin defines a team
leader’s/member’s role within the project owner’s organization, and in
relation to the engineering contractor, construction contractor, and
manufacturer supplier. Allegiances to a company can influence priorities,
politically, for a team member. For example, the narrative’s content and
approach may be affected psychodynamically by the narrator’s role within
the project’s multiple organizations. Certain characteristics directly affect
how stable or change-resistant a person is psychologically, and a person’s
role within a project may not be a person’s usual role. For example, an
engineering manager on the design of a chemical plant may occupy some
other position in his or her organization of origin. There may be role
confusion if the team leader has not adequately communicated the scope
and responsibility of the new position.
4) Diversity of background and culture. Projects comprise different
organizational entities, yet the entities must work together on a common
set of project deliverables. For example, as projects increasingly use
modular construction, there may be four or five teams distributed
throughout the world with one common goal of building an offshore
platform. They might never have been physically co-located, but have
shared deliverables and are interdependent.
5) Competitors may be required to work as a team. Projects assemble a
shorter-term contingent workforce. Competitors (contractors) working on
the same team must cooperate.
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6) Technologies and the work environment change often. The constant
stress of adapting to new work surroundings can be further exacerbated
by inconsistent day-to-day tools for communications and reporting.
With this level of underlying uncertainty, it is important to establish a bond that
extends beyond the financial and organizational definition of a project team. As a
result, the goals, intent, and content of a narrative fluctuate with project scope
and temporal phase.
Project team dynamics change faster than team dynamics in traditional
organizations, and team memberships change throughout the life of a project
(Ammeter & Dukerich, 1998). Bud Ahearn, one of my contributors, articulates this
impact on the project organization’s culture:
as a matter of fact, you are actually building a new culture every time you
add an individual to an organization. Whether a project team or a new
functional leader…or a new skill, you are actually building a new culture
and the idea is to talk about just that — the way we do things around here,
our core values, our world view. I ask questions and give them a little bit of
what I just did there [sharing his own perspective and values] with that
stream of consciousness. (Bud Ahearn, September 2013)
Does a contingent workforce influence the project narrative?
Construction Industry Institute (CII) research focuses on improving project
performance through industry best practices. One of the key areas of study is in
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understanding the attributes of high-performing teams. The CII literature points
consistently to the following Common characteristics of high performance teams
(Ammeter & Dukerich, 1998):
1) Leader behaviours
a. communicating goals
b. setting high standards and expectations
c. supporting team decisions
2) Member characteristics
a. commitment and dedication to the project
b. sense of ownership of the project
c. the right qualifications
While many projects engage in widely practiced team building activities, the CII
has found that to a lesser extent, team building behaviours form the basis for
high-performing project teams (Ammeter & Dukerich, 1998). The relationship
between the leader and the member (Other) is essential to having a high-
performance team. The stories they exchange often ease or lessen any feelings
of contingency so that there is a shared understanding of the project scope.
The workforce engaged on a capital project is highly contingent, which changes
the context for a contributor’s narrative. Although it is difficult to ascertain whether
or not a highly contingent workforce is under more pressure to perform than a
traditional organization’s workforce, it is certainly clear that project people have
very little time to make sense of their situation. Narrative, therefore, becomes a
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means of building project identity. In sharing his or her own story, the leader is
able to accelerate or create a psychological space for this making sense phase.
Organizational culture and its influence on the project leader’s narrative
It is imperative to understand attitudes and relationships because they
represent ways of coping with enduring implicit or explicit problems.
(Levinson, 2009)
Many project leaders are suspicious of the value of understanding a team’s
psychodynamics. Lena Bryan is one of my thesis contributors. Her understanding
of the psychodynamic approach in leadership is conflicted.
What is their internal driver? What drives them on their job? We’re here for
the career. What drives them as a person? You know I am not going to
involve a family situation on a project. What drives you — the team
member — to either be successful or not successful — and I’m not going
ask them what their definition of success is because success means that
we deliver the project together. (Lena Bryan, September 2013)
She is, understandably, uncomfortable with becoming a team psychologist.
However, she sees her leadership support as being either one-way —
psychologist — or the preferred, less ambiguous way — organizational manager
of transactions. She knows that she must understand what drives the Other. Yet,
at the same time, she is not able to appreciate the value of understanding what
drives the Other outside the scope of the project.
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Project balance of individual and collective emotional needs A leader’s ability to change course with relative ease in a capital project is
essential and requires a notion of mutuality. Balancing and connecting with the
emotional needs of the Other, my leaders were able to form bonds. These key
notions in The EQ Edge (Book & Stein, 2011) are aspects of emotional
intelligence:
• Self-Perception
• Emotional Self-Awareness
• Self-Regard
• Self-Actualization
• Self-Expression
• Emotional Expression
• Independence
• Assertiveness
• Interpersonal Relationships
• Empathy
• Social Responsibility
Team members on a project do not typically feel as if they belong to any one
organization. This raises the question of whether or not a successful project
environment allows its contributors to belong to the team for which they were
hired. It is the sense of belonging that makes the project successful, because this
belonging sets a safe foundation for meaningful business relationships. Project
decision making is significantly accelerated if individual decision makers trust one
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another. The leader bridges the gap for the Other by representing the interests of
the project while balancing these interests with what the Other needs.
Dr. Quy Nguyen Huy distinguishes between an organization’s emotional
capability and an individual’s — for purposes of this research, the leader’s —
emotional intelligence (Nguyen Huy, 1999). Both are needed in environments of
radical change. Because projects are in a constant state of change, this balance
and understanding of both emotional and change dynamics contribute to a
project’s agility to build and support high-performance teams (see Common
characteristics of high performance teams [Ammeter & Dukerich, 1998] above).
Dr. Nguyen’s Multilevel Framework outlines organizational and individual
coexistence theories of emotional capability and emotional intelligence (Nguyen
Huy, 1999) and the value of this framework in supporting radical change. While
the project leader may not be aware of such a model, his or her understanding of
it will contribute to a project executive’s tolerance of the model’s value as part of
a leadership approach to building high-performance teams.
If this is true, then project leaders must provide opportunities for bonds to form
and a sense of belonging to grow. A sense of belonging can only occur when we
are understood. We are only understood if people take the time to understand us.
A project narrator can understand the Other only by listening and relating to the
Other as an individual. When the narrator reflects on what the Other has said, he
is able to align his message for the Other.
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The individual’s culture of origin affects whether the leader’s narrative content is
implicit or explicit. Contributors with extensive experience working with a variety
of cultures reported the use of eye contact, body language, and intuition to gauge
when Others are engaged in conversation with them. They also used these skills
to determine whether or not others were reluctant to discuss themselves or the
project content. A project is made up of multiple layers of business relationship
that influence how the narrative will be delivered.
Projects deliver a highly concentrated work environment. Orientation training, or
onboarding, focuses more on issuing passwords and safety training than on
building collaborative relationships. There is a significant difference between the
function of narrative in a capital project and in a traditional organization.
Understanding how projects differ may uncover triggers for certain narrative
patterns (Kunda, Barley, Evans, 2002).
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The Narrators
Source Word Cloud: Narrative transcript, Bud Ahearn, September, 2013
Of my five contributors, Samuel Fredricks, Renée Townsend, Jerome Pasteur,
and Lena Bryan are all pseudonyms. Bud Ahearn is not a pseudonym. He is in
semi-retirement and was not opposed to use of his real name in this thesis.
Jerome Pasteur Jerome is a 44-year-old civil engineer. He is married and has children. He is the
oldest in his family and has one sister. His family of origin was stable; his father
and mother worked in agriculture, having inherited the business from his
grandfather.
Jerome is well educated and is a strong communicator. He likes to talk but he is
also a good listener. He holds a master’s degree and is working on his PhD part
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time. He currently works in one of the world’s largest infrastructure projects as a
systems integration manager. His role is diverse and he has worked
internationally. He has chosen his current position because it keeps him close to
home. He smiles effortlessly, is enthusiastic, and strikes me as someone for
whom it is important to be liked.
In our interview, Jerome mentioned the importance of establishing mutual
outcomes as a means of achieving a common ground within his team. This, he
claims, is a measure of his team’s success. Understanding the goals and
aspirations of the Other is important to Jerome and, curiously, he rarely mentions
the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the project during our discussion. Even
though he introduces himself as a manager, he seeks to genuinely understand
the Other in a working relationship. Jerome does this because
the prerequisite for establishing mutuality is to understand the priorities
and values of those with whom you are trying to connect.
(Jerome Pasteur, June 2013)
As Jerome shares his narrative with me, he becomes aware of the use of the job
description “engineer” and its potential to be intimidating. Listening to my
reactions in the interview, he reflects quickly and he interprets how I may be
feeling. He seeks to understand me and mirrors my feelings by sharing his own
experiences. He encourages me not to be intimidated:
Engineers tend to deal in absolutes and, because the “soft” or “human”
side of project delivery cannot be measured absolutely, they are more apt
to dismiss this important side of the project as a nice to have and think to
themselves, who has time for this? This is a defense mechanism used as
a justification for not addressing this human level of the project. Given that
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the engineering discipline, particularly in a project like this one, can be
very complex, involving multiple design constraints, the fact that this is a
high-profile infrastructure project only adds further stress to the work
environment. Should a bridge or rail track switch fail, it can cost lives.
(Jerome Pasteur, June 2013)
Even though I am role playing with Jerome, he sets me at ease as he aligns his
story to his interpretation of how I (the Other) must be feeling. Jerome continues
to put himself in the Other’s place when he narrates. He says, if I were you…; in
your place and I’m not sure how others feel, but to my mind... His empathetic
approach is delivered effortlessly and it is difficult for me to detect any lack of
sincerity. He often asks me (as his role-play employee): How are you feeling?
When I ask how he might put himself forward for a promotion, or other
recognition, he becomes uncomfortable:
I am not a come off it type of guy. I like people who tell it like it is. I’m not a
great person at beefing myself up. I tend to work more around
personalities. So if I were to — I’m hesitating to use the word [hesitating
here and almost whispering] im…press. I tend to work more on the
personal side than overtly business. It is important for me to work on the
personal side. I want the Other to like me, respect me, trust me.
The reason for that is that that has kind of done me a lot of good over the
years. You know, building that personal relationship, which isn’t always
appropriate in a working environment, but, that I build personal trust. This
just feels like a very safe way for me to do business. That in a very safe
way gets them [the others] to be able to understand what makes me tick.
(Jerome Pasteur, June 2013)
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Jerome judges personal relationship as being – perhaps – not appropriate, this
was a consistent theme among most of my thesis interviews. The organizations
Jerome has worked in, either past or present, may not have formally endorsed
such a personal approach. Further, this notion of success as tied to approach is
also evident in the interview with Samuel Fredricks.
Samuel Fredricks Samuel Fredricks is a senior information leader in a Canadian oil company. He
has led teams on both sides of the Atlantic. He is married, has two grown
children, and appears to have a well-balanced career and family life. His parents
were significant contributors to the communities in which they lived. This
influenced his approach to leadership and building trust.
My parents: my dad was an electrician, my mom a nurse. I think they were
both very successful in their own way in their careers. But they were more
in service industries or that type of thing — or took direction from others.
(Samuel Fredericks, September 2013)
Because Samuel was a geologist in Canada’s oil patch at a time of significant
economic growth, he was likely to have a successful career. The science training
had an interesting side effect on what his leadership style would, one day, be.
Considering, as well, his parents’ influence and his innate ability to be reflective,
he spoke of the time when he realized academic learning was only part of what
he needed to be successful.
Maybe in the last year [of university] all of that changed. Because if you
are always acing everything - that can give you a level of confidence that
always doesn’t do you well. What I took away from school is that effort and
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attitude are going to be very important, because you are not going to blow
everyone away because you are always right and know the answer all the
time.
I guess that is where that [his self-awareness and willingness to be
vulnerable] came from and that has served me well through my entire
career. If you have a good attitude, that is always important and
sometimes more important than what you are actually doing.
Because you are not always going to get it right. You are not always going
to knock their socks off. But if you have your superior’s confidence and
respect… it has always served me well, that kind of approach. I haven’t
always been the rock star. (Samuel Fredricks, September, 2013)
Samuel has developed his own leadership style, which involves sharing his
narrative openly and honestly as he develops his teams.
I struggle to tell people directly what I want from them. Because more
often than not, I have to change my mind because I’m wrong or whatever.
So you know a lot of things, on how I run teams, I tend to avoid, at least
initially or unless we’re in a crunch [I try to avoid] being too explicit on how
I want things to run — what I want them to do and how I want them to do
it. I like to have a much more evolutionary and collaborative approach.
And I could say that is because I want everybody’s strengths and
weaknesses to come together for me in a team and that, I guess, is part of
it. But part of it, too, is that I have never ever really been that successful at
taking a command and control approach to leadership. I very much rely on
other people. I need my people to argue with me. (Samuel Fredricks,
September, 2013)
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Renée Townsend Renée is 30-something and has a distinctly approachable air. She listens well
and is easy to talk to. She has a middle-Eastern heritage, is married, and is an
engineer. She has international exposure in that she is multilingual and was
educated in Europe and North America. She feels close to her geographically
distributed family. She is skilled both socially and academically and is intelligent.
Although she is aware of her talents, she is humble and has an uncommon
sincerity that is not contaminated by arrogance.
Even on an engineering project and in our discussions of how Renée uses her
own narrative to align with her team, her approach is tied to her upbringing:
My mom studied later in life and she would want me to help her in her
Physics class so that I could see her work hard and struggle. She wanted
me to understand that not everyone has it easy so that even though I was
smart, that wasn’t all there was to it. She didn’t want us showing off about
good grades. She was very sensitive about it…It was important for her to
raise children who were good people, like, good to others. (Renée
Townsend, June 2013)
As Renée builds her team in the onset phase of a significant world city
expansion, she sees team building as entirely a relationship-development
exercise; therefore, for her, it cannot be linked to a deliberate set of technical or
project-specific actions on the part of the project manager, team lead, or project
executive.
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In fact, to align with teams, the project leader requires a set of social skills that
are not as measurable as other project metrics such as schedule, budget, and
safety. The project leader must build bonds with others so that the group can
contribute collaboratively to successful project outcomes. This ability to build
positive interpersonal relationships is heightened by a person’s overall emotional
intelligence (Stein & Book, 2011). Renée highlights the value of building a
relationship beyond her formal, project leader role:
When I meet someone, I never start by… I don’t usually start by… talking
about me. I usually ask questions about them. People usually don’t realize
that they don’t know very much about me and sort of “discover” this after
quite some time along in the relationship. But by then, I seem to know
enough about them to know how to present myself. (Renée Townsend,
June 2013)
As I struggle with what I had perceived to be my inability to acquire Renée’s
story, I discover that she has reconciled her emotional intelligence approach to
engineering project leadership as key to her success as a leader. Her stories are
not about her, she acquires stories and learns about the Other. This approach is
consistent with that of the other 80% of my contributors. Renée emphasizes the
importance of her personal connection approach for team alignment:
Frankly, Dawn, I think now that this is my strength as a project manager. I
am young (for the job I do) and I may not know as much as others, but I
genuinely like people. I genuinely care about the people in my team. If
anything, I probably care more for the people on my team than for the
project itself. If people on the project feel valued, they will work when you
need them to. (Renée Townsend, June 2013)
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Leadership is both the practice and example of leading. Manfred Kets de Vries
defines leadership as a set of characteristics — behavior pattern and personality
attributes that influence a team in attaining a common goal (Kets de Vries, 2006).
Renée’s self awareness and her approach to other team members secure her
leadership role on the project. She provides a safe place for her team,
somewhere they can make mistakes and excel for the projects she leads.
Lena Bryan Lena Bryan is a mid-level executive in a large Western-Canada-based oil and
gas company. When I first met Lena, she was reasonably open and curious, yet
understandably cautious about INSEAD CCC and my thesis. After introducing the
concept of the thesis and giving her an idea of the time commitment, I
deliberately engineered a period of two months to give her time to back out.
However, from the moment I saw her for our previously-scheduled interview, I felt
she was uncomfortable. She struggled to separate herself as a leader from the
transactions of managing a project and consistently sought clarification for the
context of the narrative.
You would get yourself organized to help organize the group to deliver the
project… you are going to have some fundamentals that you are always
going to do for every project — using the same framework where the
same team executes different projects — it doesn’t matter if it’s the same
people or it’s different people. (Lena Bryan, August 2013)
In Lena’s case, I had challenges understanding what her narrative was or even
how she collected the narrative from the Other. She was clearly uncomfortable
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with an unstructured interview format where there were no right or wrong
answers. Even though she shared with me a solid framework for how teams
should run, she was not comfortable peeling back this formal layer to reveal her
personal experiences building teams using her narratives. Her personal
experience as a leader was missing from our interview. I struggled to find the
personal pieces of her leadership stories. The framework could be linked to an
industry-endorsed framework. The experience layer lacked structure for her and
she was visibly uncomfortable with this.
In the interview, I felt that I was being told how projects should work, that is, she
cited best practices. There was a nagging question for me in the session: Where
do the best practices stop and where does she, as a unique authentic,
empathetic leader, begin? She frequently used words like absolutely and of
course which were in stark contrast to word choice amongst my other
contributors. They would tend toward more flexible language such as: I’m not
sure or I do this naturally, this is something I just do. I got the impression she
believed that project execution best practices and narrative are one and the
same. Lena seemed unable to reconcile her professional views on leadership
with an unstructured, personal, Other-centric approach used by my other
contributors.
Major General Joseph (Bud) A. Ahearn Bud Ahearn is a rich example of a project leader. He has spent 58 of his 78 years
as a leader or member of military and engineering construction teams. He is a
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Construction Industry Institute (CII) elder and has a great deal of experience
either participating in or leading capital projects.
When asked about his narrative, the one he uses to bring team members
together to deliver a project, he consistently veers to the Other’s needs and the
importance of not coming to premature conclusions:
The idea of remaining open and situational: leadership is about situational
awareness and intention — the intended outcome and openness gives
you a far more stronger opportunity to get a much higher performance
level. (Bud Ahearn, September 2013)
Four out of five of the leaders I interviewed were willing to let their narrative
evolve with their audience and to display vulnerability as they connected with
their Others. However, Bud points out that there is a dark side to being open and
situational, listening and empathetic, in the hard-nosed construction world.
Let’s translate these rich, introspective skills to an engineering project
environment [like many Engineering Procurement and Construction firms]
inward directed instead of externally directed. There are those that will
reject you and marginalize you — nothing hurts worse than this, it really
burns — there is a gritty side of being rejected.
(Bud Ahearn, September 2013)
Bud has experienced this gritty side of relationships not only in business but also,
emotionally, from a very early age. He was in Selma, Alabama while he was
serving in the military. Martin Luther King was front and centre in the press:
[In the late 1930s, my family] was all about openness and inclusiveness. I
learned this in playing baseball with the Blacks. In games, kids don’t care
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about what colour a person is. The notion of openness and inclusiveness
was something that I grew up with [in my family].
Dad was a baseball fan and we shared a family experience of a streetcar
ride and Jackie Robinson [playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers]…Dad took us
to one of those ball games and this was very impactful for my sisters and
me. (Bud Ahearn, September 2013)
Inasmuch as emotional experiences influence a project leader’s leadership style,
leadership behaviours have a powerful influence over an organization’s success.
On an engineering construction project, the openness required to achieve high
performance challenges a project leader’s ability to strike a balance of individual
and collective emotional needs (see above, Project balance of individual and
collective emotional needs) without appearing too soft or vulnerable. As Bud
describes the role of his narrative as he builds teams, he speaks of three
elements. The first is the ability to be Other-centric. He describes the other two
elements:
The second element is to move out of that zone of comfortness [sic] and to
move out of that comfort zone and to be willing to walk naked and alone
down the pathways of uncertainty, buoyed by the power of your vision
…and that is a risk-taking venture that says I’ve got a higher demand for a
higher performance. I want to move from satisfactory to excellence to
extraordinary and if I’m going to do that, I have to get into a position of
breakthrough performance or a higher risk taking and there is a lot of
resistance to that. Particularly for those who put into place structure,
processes and tools and control mechanisms to make sure you don’t
venture off the ranch. But if you were to get to a position of extraordinary
performance, one must move from the position of risk averse to some
degree of risk taking.
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The third element that drives me is this notion of being open vis-à-vis
closed — natural tendency is that I’ve got my structure, processes and
people and we’re gonna get ourselves a rigorous position. We’re gonna
perform and I’ll be darned if I’m gonna let anybody challenge my closed
and established systems and processes. (Bud Ahearn, September 2013)
These systems and processes — along with the unwillingness of many leaders to
take risks and be open — are real barriers to Bud’s priorities for connecting with
team members and can cause the burn he spoke of.
Bud’s ability to “remain open and situational” (Bud Ahearn, September 2013) was
shared by four out of five of my thesis contributors. Samuel spoke of his
“evolutionary and collaborative approach.” Jerome spoke of his “mutual
outcomes.” Renée spoke of how she genuinely cares for people. These
approaches had one common theme: the recognition and appreciation of the
Other’s emotional ability to connect with a team. Without their recognition of the
Other’s ability to align, they could not effectively align.
Curiously, Bud, Samuel, Jerome, and Renée did not speak of the Other’s skill
set, their education, what projects the Other had been on. In each case, the
approach had to do with the emotional (personal) first and the skills second.
Admittedly, each leader was sufficiently confident emotionally to connect with
team members in this way. Where contributors were willing to share more
intimate details of their family and how their family influenced their ability to
emotionally align with their teams, their ability to align with the Other was less
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forced. Having a strong sense of their own identity, supported by their early
family experiences, allowed them to have a strong, Other-centric leadership style.
The Other The Other is the person to whom the leader is speaking. The leader builds
relationships as a foundation for his or her project team with various Others. The
Other is on the receiving end of the leader’s narrative. For purposes of this
research, in the context of projects, the leader delivers his story to the Other. The
Other’s perspective is significant for leaders, as this perspective provides subtle
direction for the content of the leader’s own narrative. Without the Other’s input,
the leader is at a loss as to how to position his or her own narrative. He does not
know where to start.
In my leaders’ interviews, I set a general context for acquiring my leader’s
narrative. My leaders needed a great deal of information about the context of the
conversation but, more importantly, they needed to know more about the Other,
that is: who is he/she; what is he/she like, what are his or her personal and
professional motivations for taking this job?
As information about the Others emerged, the leaders used this information as
direction. The Other’s verbal and non-verbal feedback provides a live context for
the story. From this context a shared narrative — a story that bonds the leader
and the Other — started to emerge.
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The narrative build, which evolves almost entirely in situ, reinforces the leader’s
credibility. The process is natural and genuine where the relationship between
the narrator and the Other can flow in a non-judgemental, safe way. Bud Ahearn
supports this:
By focusing on Other-centredness, we artfully influence the notion of
collaboration and resilience in business. (Bud Ahearn, September 2013)
Typically, the project story is heavily influenced by the circumstances or context
of the introduction. I have found that the leader’s ability to form his narrative to
the Other and enable the Other to connect on a more personal — yet not
intrusive — level is a skill. Although the narrative can be broken down into
learnable components, its core, i.e., how the leader delivers it and sets the stage
for interaction, is artfully customized for the Other.
People will know if you are not genuine, so you have no choice but to be
genuine. They will know if you are faking. (Renée Townsend, June
2013)
Key attributes of leadership narrative to engage the Other A project leader’s frame of mind is significant and team members are influenced
by the leader’s frame of mind. However, at a high level, the patterns of the project
leader’s narrative include key, identifiable components:
1. Deep listening and reflecting — The leader asks questions about the
Other to learn how to build his/her own story. The business goal may
be implicit or explicit in the discussion. The business may not be
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discussed at this phase and this is significant. In many cases the goal
of achieving project deliverables is secondary. Deep listening can help
leaders take an accurate reading of the collective emotions on his or
her team or on the project. Reflecting on what the Other says, the
leader is able to move to aligning.
2. Aligning (mirroring) — The narrator picks up threads of the Other’s
beliefs, priorities and motivations regarding who they are. The leader
constructs his or her story based on the perspective of the Other’s
narrative and may even mirror his content to align with the Other. The
leader may reconstruct his narrative to contain personal stories of
failure or lessons learned. In this case, the Other feels safe to take
risks which may expose him or her to failure. The Other’s story and the
leader’s story connect to deliver mutual project outcomes.
3. Collaborating — Team members must spend time together either
physically or virtually. As the relationship between the leader and the
Other matures, virtual collaboration tools enhance a relationship that is
already in place. For example using instant messaging, Live Meetings2
and video chats build on an existing connection. Over time, this ability
to collaborate is the heavy-duty glue that allows a team to understand
each other’s role in the team. As project deliverables evolve, these
roles may shift to support new project activities. A team that truly
2 Live Meetings integrate messaging, screen sharing and audio using the Internet.
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collaborates — where there is trust — is able to adapt to a project’s
changing needs.
Table 1 : Listen, Align, Collaborate
The bubble diagram above depicts three focus areas for the leader to build a
high-performing team. This approach is not a linear, if that, then, process. The
bubbles coexist and support loose relationship groupings. The diagram illustrates
that as the business relationship matures, smaller bubbles merge to form larger
ones to achieve cohesion. The leader’s ability to manipulate his or her own story
content regarding him or herself is key to establishing trust.
Trust amongst team members is a significant project attribute because without it,
teams risk wasting project resources on busywork3 or other low-value activities.
3 Busywork refers to the process of appearing busy but is actually work of low contributing value to a business context (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 2013).
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For example, a worker copying 15 people on a routine email meant for two or
three people is busywork. Such a time-wasting practice attempts to impress
others with the author’s fantasies that his or her work is significant or that he or
she is protecting themselves. This practice is a good example of a team
experiencing trust issues where the leader has been unable to align the team at
an emotional level. This practice has the potential to unnecessarily engage
others and waste project resources. Where there is strong project leadership and
trust amongst team members, these busywork activities are greatly reduced.
Strong leadership frees up resources to concentrate on project deliverables
which drive overall success.
If the bones were the project organizations and the muscles the individuals
working on the projects, the connective tissue between the bones and the
muscles would be the leader’s ability to align his or her team. The leader’s
influence in building individual, peer and team relationships is significant and
starts with either his acquiring the Other’s narrative or delivering his or her own.
Team building, alignment, and performance
Team building does not contribute to team high performance where there
is an absence of effective project leadership behaviors. (CII Team, 1999)
The University of Austin’s Construction Industry Institute (CII) has been studying
high-performance teams and leadership for decades. The CII draws on a unique
blend of academic and industry contribution. The data is rich with industry
examples and case studies. Research participants contribute case studies on
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everything from project leadership to project logistics and materials deliverables.
Project leadership behaviour and the importance of Front End Planning (FEP)
and team alignment are key areas of research for the CII. They have developed
frameworks, benchmarking tools, and evaluation and coding schemes to analyze
and grade projects for performance efficiency and effectiveness.
The CII’s definition of alignment is
The condition where appropriate project participants are working within
acceptable tolerances to develop and meet a uniformly defined and
understood set of project objectives. (CII Team, 2009)
Although this research is comprehensive, it does not analyze the psychodynamic
or human aspect of how the project’s leadership experiences alignment or
correlate these factors to project success or failure. From the interviews
conducted for this thesis, the onset of alignment occurs more organically when a
relationship of trust exists among the project participants. Each project
possesses a unique set of organization priorities that influence the project
dynamic and the development of narratives associated with it. In this context,
then, the narrative is the one constant that connects the leader with his or her
Others.
An emotionally intelligent approach to team alignment Project leaders tell stories about their teams to engage individual team members
and develop a core team. This process helps build alignment, based on trust,
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which is a vital means of contributing to a project’s success. Bud Ahearn believes
that the narrative is a mechanism for building high-performance teams:
Building cohesion in a team might be uncomfortable for people? No, the
notion is inclusiveness — build an organizational vision and resourcing
and culture that is unique to major project teams — bring people from
within and without — your client base and your providers are sometimes
difficult to distinguish. Opinion leaders need to be welcomed and engaged.
That is an interviewing technique that I have picked up and it is also a
team-building technique. When one goes about forming a team, you
actually are doing a selection process, a recruiting process whether it is
merging with another company or whether it is bringing people from
different departments into your project team. And so I do it with discussion
and interview and really listening — are they givers or are they takers?
You know, I speak quite candidly about that. There are a lot of folks who
are ladder climbers and you know what that means. There is a certain
aroma to that kind of behaviour. You can pick up on it pretty quickly and
ask a couple of questions and there are some remarkable selfless
professionals around that are willing to… there is judgement involved in
this… highly creative people are often repulsed by the more structured,
conventional people … As a matter of fact, business development people
look like they are very self-centred where they are not, really, as a central
tendency. (Bud Ahearn, September 2013)
A common theme in construction industry literature is the importance of effective
communication and alignment. In the CII paper “Alignment During Pre-Project
Planning: A Key to Project Success,” of the top five issues affecting successful
project alignment, culture is number one:
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Culture: The attitudes, values, behavior, and environment of the company
and the pre-project planning team. (Team, 2009)
Project culture is increasingly difficult to influence singularly or holistically. Even
in a pre-planning context, more and more frequently, the project’s scope is sub-
divided discreetly. Pre-planning can be executed across contracting
organizations and geographies. The quality of leadership that involves instilling
common, aligned project values and beliefs is increasingly important. Using
themselves and their stories as the tool, project leaders can increase
opportunities for problem solving that can positively affect a project.
Creating a team identity for alignment A project’s complexity may be detrimental to forming teams. A complex project,
delivering on a single scope, is frequently carved up into smaller pieces known as
silos. While that represents a sound strategy from the perspective of budget and
schedule management, when people are pulled across project silos, there is
confusion. Projects are staffed with highly specialized people accustomed to
making independent decisions (CII Team, 2009). A project’s hierarchy or culture
may contribute to political misunderstandings, power struggles, and in-fighting.
It makes sense, then, that narratives in large capital projects serve to develop the
team’s identity. One overarching influence, however, is that the Other’s
organization of origin can act as a family of origin which has an influence on his
or her identity. The business card each person carries is an identity symbol. As a
result, the reputation of the family can affect the individual’s context for
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connecting with other teams to deliver. The leader’s approach to narrative may
have to overcome an organizational identity, that of the Other’s business card.
Much as individuals can develop identities outside their families, project
contributors develop their respective identities beyond the companies they
represent as the project evolves. As they feel connected to a project team, it
becomes less important to preserve the individual’s identity in the organization of
origin once the project is in flight. Renée must understand the Other’s motivation.
For her, this motivation does not have to be strictly business-related.
It is really important to understand why a person is in the position he/she is
in. Is it location? Money? Career advancement? Once I can establish what
motivates them, it is easier for me to establish a trusting relationship. The
most important thing is to accept the person — almost unconditionally as a
person. (Renée Townsend, June 2013)
The importance of spending time The leader must be as accessible as possible to the Other. While this may seem
counter-intuitive to completing the project, time spent together shapes the
relationship. There is no substitute for time spent on the relationship and creating
opportunities for project people to have high-quality conversations. If the leader
does not spend time with the Other, there will be no shared narrative. Neither the
narratives nor the manipulation of what is said to the Other can ensure a high-
quality conversation will occur. The narrative can merely influence the
relationship and build trust — over time.
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The time that is spent delivering narratives provides an opportunity to
build crucial foundations:
• trust
• the foundation for freely, creatively associating and problem solving
• resiliency
• a higher purpose beyond the business boundaries of the project
• a willingness to experience conflict
• the courage to change perspective or direction
Conclusion: Project leader narratives create safe places to build team alignment In the late 1980s, I was a computer helpdesk analyst at Finance Canada. At that
time, there was a peculiar intensity to the long hours leading up to the Finance
Minister’s budget speech. Our team needed to ensure all aspects of financial and
economic reporting would not be hindered by server, computer or printer
outages. These days were dark and stress-laden. The Canadian public’s scrutiny
of government expenditures and their expectations of tax cuts stripped our
team’s collective emotions of any optimism or joy. This feeling of being
consistently under the gun is not unlike the project environment reporting and
scrutiny I experience working on multi-billion dollar industrial projects today.
Shareholder scrutiny of capital expenditures and regulators’ increased sensitivity
to industrial expansions confuse the importance of project deliverables. Much as
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our stressed staff economists would ask, “What would you like the graphs to look
like, Mister Minister,” project executives are comfortable with measuring every
conceivable aspect of their project’s deliverables provided that the output makes
the project look successful. What is measured gets done is a motto shared
amongst most industrial project managers.
Project managers can easily manipulate metrics to highlight success. Status
reports must frequently be accompanied by complex presentations, which often
leave stakeholders scratching their heads as to whether or not the project is
successful. What project managers cannot easily do, however, is measure and
report the degree to which their teams are aligned or emotionally connected.
While the practice of reporting common metrics has the illusion of driving activity,
stakeholders increasingly know there are less measurable yet significant soft
contributors to project success. However, integrating people alignment and
emotional intelligence (EI) measures is still too ambiguous for many project
managers. They are frequently not given the context or language to report or
support soft metrics.
Lianying Zhang and Weije Fan state in “Improving performance of construction
projects: A project manager’s emotional intelligence approach” that 69 percent of
the skills that promote work success are emotional competencies (Zhang & Fan,
2013) and that Emotional Intelligence (EI) groups these competencies into a core
set of emotional skills. This finding is consistent with mounting empirical evidence
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in the engineering and construction industry that the leading indicator of strong
project performance is team alignment. The presence of emotional competencies
in project leadership is also strongly represented as an indicator of project
success.
Although the business case for projects to concentrate on developing emotional
competencies is comprehensive, there continues to be uneasiness with the
explicit use of these competencies on industrial projects. While the Construction
Industry Institute (CII) measures alignment by assigning scores to qualitative
measures such as readiness, this is only in the Front End Planning (FEP) phase
of a project (Construction Industry Institute, 2013). Alignment is rarely measured
over a project’s full lifecycle. There are no EI-related benchmarks for large
projects. It is for this reason that my thesis concentrates on deconstructing
leadership narrative to discover patterns and attributes that serve to better align
teams and raise awareness of the value of these competencies in industrial
projects.
Initially, my project leaders were able to understand that I was collecting the
narratives they used to align their individual contributors into a team. Yet when
physically faced with their narrative discussions, four of my five contributors
admitted the approach was ambiguous for them. The only contributor who fully
understood his use of narrative was retired. He was exceptionally comfortable
with his set of narratives and has given his stories a great deal of reflection. He
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had a heightened awareness of how his stories allowed him to build bonds with
his teams. For my other contributors, it was not until we sat together to discuss
their narratives’ role that they had considered their stories’ effectiveness in
building alignment within their team. A good example of this came up when I
interviewed Samuel:
I guess I never really thought of how I use [narrative] that way until I was
thinking about talking to you. (Samuel Fredricks, September, 2013)
A leader’s capacity to be Other-centric is persistently undervalued or
misunderstood. In my extensive experience on large projects, the respected
norm is leadership coming to quick (often premature) conclusions. This dilutes a
leader’s effectiveness and does not support a feeling of safety in the team. When
team members feel time pressure to perform, they have no time to build mutual
trust, and alignment is elusive. Misunderstanding and a lack of trust frequently
translate into valuable time wasted on a project, which affects cost and schedule.
This is a case where “soft problems cost hard dollars” (Manfred Kets de Vries,
CCC Wave 13, Module 8, September, 2013).
The foundational pieces of the narratives of project leaders were not actually
stories at all but more of a set of leadership behaviours for engaging the Other.
The lead narrator should shift from the Other to leader and back again. The
freedom leaders feel to explore the Other’s story and the value they gain through
this exploration are common themes in the interviews I conducted. The Other
appears to control the future flow of narrative. It is the Other who does most of
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the talking — at least while the leader establishes a sense of who the Other is.
The leader controls the narrative as he or she discover the Other’s motivations.
Project leaders tend to collect narratives from the Other where they are trying to
build, simultaneously, trust for themselves as a leader and an understanding of
the priorities and contribution potential of the Other.
In the majority of the narratives I collected, the leaders’ emotional competencies
were easy to distinguish. They used words like empathy and self-awareness.
They repeatedly tried to understand the perspective of the Other. However, what
was difficult to distinguish was whether or not these competencies were innate,
learned over time through experiences, or learned in formal training.
Where I confirmed that there was formal training, the leaders used EI language to
describe their approach. Empathy was the word most used. Their ability to use EI
language pointed to the importance of an emotional connection with the Other in
effective leadership. If EI was evident or their experiences opened them up to
using EI in their relationships, they embraced an EI approach. They read about
EI, or their leadership professional development courses addressed the
importance of using EI principles in leading teams.
By asking my contributors how and why they take these approaches, I drilled
down to psychodynamic analysis of the narrative. A leader’s ability to be nimble
enough to establish mutuality with the Other results in the leader’s ability to be
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relevant to the Other. The only way to achieve relevance is in understanding the
Other by listening and by using an EI approach to engaging team members.
Given that emotional intelligence can be parsed into defined, labeled and learned
skills (Stein and Book, 2011), a project leader’s approach to understanding and
knowing the Other’s context and priorities depends very much on the context,
character, and personality of the Other. My contributors felt the only way to
discover this was to get the Other to share narratives. The leader’s act of
listening creates an atmosphere of safety for the Other where the leader, the
Other, and the remaining team can align to achieve common project goals.
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