Iryna Viter 
As resource management is our genuine passion, we’ve compiled a list of recommendations and insightful tips to assist you in improving teamwork based on expert advice from outstandingly successful project managers – the CEOs of Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Atlassian, and Starbucks. The first thing to remember, and never doubt, is that your team is your power.
Cultivate the Skill of Continuous Improvement
Never hesitate to provide your employees with time for training. Jeff Sutherland, Scrum co-creator, is convinced that project managers should guide their teams to continuous improvement, analyzing their interactions, practices, and processes to reach better outcomes. In his book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, Sutherland points out that regularly spotting the obstacles that reduce the speed of your team’s work is the cornerstone of hyperproductive teams. Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle and a successful role model for many entrepreneurs, confesses that you should encourage your team to improve their skills at work. Ellison says that “if people don’t feel they’re improving their skills and moving ahead in the organization, you’re not going to keep them.”
Read on: Top PM conferences to visit in 2018 to broaden your knowledge.
Apply the Less-is-More Principle
To succeed in building an effective team, you should limit the number of members. Peter Drucker, a project management guru for many business experts, including Bill Gates, affirms that teams work best when they’re small. In this vein, the founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, advocates a two-pizza rule: “teams shouldn’t be larger than what two pizzas can feed.” This phenomenal finding was discovered when looking for a valid way to encourage communication in the workplace. Certainly, it’s easier to socialize in a smaller circle, as a pizza team of six people has fewer links to manage and can more easily share experience or work updates. Jason Fried and David Hansson, the co-founders of 37signals and the authors of the bestselling book Rework, explain that this is a kind of constraint that bears advantages in disguise: “Boxing ourselves in this way prevents us from creating bloated products.” Fewer resources are likely to stimulate creativity and simplicity. It is also proven to be the perfect number for implementing Agile methodologies.
Find Better Ways to Avert Chaos
Two Australian fellows, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, the co-owners of Atlassian and the creators of Jira, know from their own experience that teamwork can be messy and chaotic.
The complexity of teams can be supported by the right project management software. Yuri Warczynski, recognized as the tech CEO of the Year in the Ukrainian IT BIZ Awards 2016 and the co-founder of Epicflow, has demonstrated that it’s possible to manage over a hundred employees with a single project manager while at the same time enabling a company to grow. To do this, you need an analytical project management tool to assist you in allocating resources, setting priorities, and creating effort-based workloads. Your team will happily thank you afterwards. Using a specific tool for a specific function keeps everything in order.
Build Trust-Based on Autonomy and Transparency
To build confidence, all you have to do is provide your team with enough free space for local knowledge. Autonomous teams become more productive in that they generate fresh and innovative ideas and complete their tasks quickly. To make sure their focus does not shift, you should first determine a list of priorities to create better flow. Howard Schultz, the current CEO of Starbucks, lists trust and focus in his agenda for successful leadership. This PM-savvy expert is sure that “working mindfully and honestly” is the backbone of an effective team. Balanced and powerful teamwork is impossible without the pillar of honesty. For effective collaboration, you need to ensure that workloads and progress of tasks are as transparent as possible.
These nourishing recipes to motivate and lead teams have worked for the wealthiest project managers, CEOs, and business owners. To learn more, explore 5 Project Management Tips from Gartner and Forrester Research.
It’s high time to let order and harmony into your work environment. Sign up for Epicflow below to get advice on the best project management software.
