What are you afraid of?

Fear. A few years ago I would never have thought that fear would play such a large role in project management. Yet I find team members, sponsors and even the executives are all too often reacting from a place of fear and not from a place of certainty. Fear is one of the many suppression factors we have to deal with in our project management careers. Suppression factors are those thoughts or conditions in our mind that keep us from declaring trouble until its often too late, and fear a very large part of that.

Fear of failure
Fear of blame or judgment
Fear of personal or professional attacks
Fear of unemployment
Have you stopped to consider what fears you might be going through, what your team might be experiencing, even what your management might be trying to hide.

I realized this problem existed over a year ago and spent a lot of time last year studying NLP and human dynamics. I did this to learn how to properly deal with issues like fear with my team and stakeholders. I did this so that I could present different ideas and solutions and start to think of a better way to work the problem. You see fear will always be there, but it can be handled in a variety of different ways.

A team that is not fearful is not afraid to alert when problems may be on the horizon. They will not hide the true status of a project. They will trust each other more, hold each other accountable for their actions, tasks, errors, and successes. They will organize themselves as a strong functioning unit working towards the common success criteria of your project. This team will be motivated to jump in when other teams would have backed away.

We all need to develop teams like this – teams that are not afraid.

I have added many great tools and techniques from my NLP training to our Project Management Coaching programs because I believe these are the valuable skills we need as leaders, www.mtilearning.com.

Have a great weekend everyone!

“B”