A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other - Simon Sinek
PMO is a team that other teams need to trust. If not, PMO Leaders and team members need to build the confidence and trust factor with the other teams.
PMO Team keeps the other teams transparent with the Org Strategies. It’s exceptionally important for the multiple teams to understand what are the CEO's Top priorities and basis that the functional teams need to build their vision and roadmap accordingly.
The functional leadership is seeking a view from the PMO. PMO acts as an ‘Internal Communication’ department with the power of influencing both sides not just passing the details to functional teams though also sharing the CEO's office view as well to the functional teams. It's a sturdy bridge between CEO / Senior Leadership and the rest of the Org.
This is just not possible, when the factor of trust is not there between the teams and in the Org. The team is a group of people with a common purpose and shared objectives who trust each other and work together to achieve the objectives.
Trust is so very important in creating a safe workplace for the team to feel valued. It has to start with the leaders.
Leaders show trust by showing their support and by listening to the team. The pillars of trust and support will resonate throughout the organisation and undoubtedly you will have a powerful team. Everyone will work towards the good for all and not for their own benefit or self-recognition. "Teamwork works".
Leaders need to ensure that team members have all the resources, guidance to ensure they are producing the results. Team members feel that they have the backing of their manager. Leadership is all about people.
Leadership is about managing outcomes, managing workflows, not just hitting the ‘send’ button on an email asking the team to do things.
The recommendation for the leaders is to hire smart, talented people, invest in them. Leaders need to define, live and celebrate the values. Make your team accountable, keep things transparent and accountability drives itself.
The foundation to a successful team is trust built through honest communication, collaborative behaviours and respect for all however so many leaders don’t trust their teams, they don’t delegate enough or do not hire people different to themselves as they see the fear of losing control.
A leader’s purpose is to empower each team member based on their own individuality to build the best collective viewpoint! It’s a such a great thing to have women and men from different cultures, who think differently, who have different opinions, who have different heritages, who can see things not in the same way but share the common goals, common values and ethics, when a leader can build that, it is building of strong team.
Many leaders you may hear saying ‘Trust but Verify’, which I feel is counterintuitive. You can never build trust if you are verifying or questioning the team's efforts. It just doesn’t work.
Well, I am not saying give the task to the team and leave it to them completely. You definitely require governance/ frameworks/ processes to ensure that the work is ongoing and communication with leaders also happens.
What I am referring to is that if you have a mindset of verifying every aspect of a task, then it's the same as ‘distrust and verify’.
As a PMO, you need to know your Brand and truly you need to be an expert in your brand. Few questions you need to ask yourself:
What is it you bring to the table?
What are the skills where you absolutely will be a rockstar? That perhaps no one can argue about it and no one else can sit on that seat where you are the expert.
PMO Teams need to take time and invest in themselves. It’s not good to always be doing the fire fighting though they need to take a PAUSE and understand what skills to be developed to help fulfill Organizational priorities.
There is a question asked in multiple forums that if PMO is developing the skills into either Product, Design, Operations or any other functional elements. If the answer is yes, then is it not that overlapping of responsibilities between two teams.
Organization requires overlapping of responsibilities as long as Org’s define the boundaries. We have several models and one of them is RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed). Now using this model, PMO can plan a role of either Responsible or Consulted or Informed if not Accountable.
The PMO team requires us to automate and streamline the repeated processes that are time-consuming. Using tools can help reduce the time taken by PMO in tactical tasks so they can spend time on strategic activities.
Every communication PMO members are part of, they need to add the value and outcomes. If not, then don't attend the meeting.
Many times a question comes, that does PMO require unlearning and ReLearn. Well, my take is that unlearning something is very difficult, you need to learn new stuff of course. Somewhere or the other, the skill you learned will use, knowing that we are living in a volatile and uncertain world where we don’t know what may happen and when. It’s the building blocks that will help you in solving business problems.
Leverage people in your team as per their strengths. Many times, we let them work upon areas which they are not comfortable with, good at the approach that needs to be completely reversed and let them work on their strengths and further build it.
Some people I call ‘Constructors’ who are good at selling ideas, convincing, highly extroverts who enjoy being part of meetings and sharing their point of view. Quite Vocal, then give similar tasks to them and there are other sets of people who I call in ‘Maintainers’ who like to build the reports, prefer sitting on a backend activity and don’t like to come into limelight and market their work.
We need both groups. Both are equally important, its PMO leader needs to understand what is the team member’s strength and further build that.
