A good project leader always knows how to make the team work better and with performance. Project leadership provides an opportunity to effective team building and collaboration. Read the top 5 tips in this quick article to find out how to be a fantastic leader of your project.
Take the five tips to improve your leadership skills:
Tip #1. Always Set SMART Goals
If there is no clear direction for your team, there is no way to reach success. The goals of your project will show the team what outcomes to produce throughout the project and what destination to reach at project completion.
You should learn to set SMART goals, which is actually means:
• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Time framed
As a great project leader, you must keep your goals SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time framed). Also avoid setting too many goals. There should be no more than 2-3 goals for a single project. The point here is to create a simple statement of project goals and therefore allow your team to gain a clear understanding of what results to achieve at project completion.
Tip #2. Motivate the Team
Motivation is your essential duty. As great project leader, you must find out exactly what incentives to use to motivate every team member and the entire team as well. Money, personal example, career promotion, recognition are some examples of incentives that you can use to motivate the team and establish teamwork.
Also you should remember about team conflicts and issues. Implementing a combination of team building exercises will help you match everyone’s individual needs, prevent conflicts, and keep the team working as hard as possible towards the project goals.
Tip #3. Keep Track of Project Changes
As your project progressively develops over time, there are some changes that must be monitored and appropriately managed. As a great project leader, you should develop and implement a change responding strategy. Such a strategy determines how to detect, measure the impact of, and respond to a change occurring in the project.
Weekly meetings can be used as a way to manage project changes. Through conducting weekly meetings with the team you are able to review the weekly events and issues, analyze the results achieved or failed, and discuss possible options and solutions. An analysis of the wins and losses through weekly team meetings will help you efficiently respond to project changes.
Tip #4. Reward Top Performers
A great project leader always rewards and recognizes team members for their high performance and contribution. You must know your top performers and constantly think of new ways of rewarding them for the right behavior.
You can try to implement two types of team reward systems, as follows below:
• Target-based reward system, which is to provide a team member with a kind of monetary or non-monetary incentives for the accuracy and timeliness of the targets this individual has hit
• Contribution-based reward system, which is to reward high performers for their overall contribution to team performance and teamwork. The system does not refer to the goals those individual have accomplished, but to the impact they have on the entire team through their top performance.
Tip #5. Exploit Training Opportunities
Time goes by so fast, and your yesterday’s knowledge and expertise may be in lower demand today. If you want to be a great project leader, you must constantly look for ways to improve your team leadership skills and read project manager’s guides.
So keep working on your analytical, communication and presentation skills each week by taking time out to educate on the web, through watching special training videos and taking online courses.
When you exploit training and self-development opportunities, you become more experienced and confident in your project manager role. You will know new ways of treating team conflicts, managing project issues, and establishing teamwork.