Disagreeing with a Key Team Member: A Survival Guide
Projects solicit many opinions and viewpoints. Good project managers seek these viewpoints and use them to evaluate alternatives and make clear decisions. However, this can get tricky when your preferred approach to addressing an issue conflicts with the approach of a respected team member. Here are steps to take to make this situation as stress-free as possible.
Contrast your experiences. Decisions should be derived using experience and intuition about potential alternatives. It’s important to note that your experiences and intuition are valid, and those of your team members are equally valid. Understanding the basis of their experience and what drives their intuition and contrasting it to yours should be used to weigh the options you both put on the table.
Ensure all of the “truth” is on the table to be considered. First, compile all the facts you and your key team member can confirm. Then, compile the beliefs and intuitive thoughts they trigger. Contrast those thoughts to past experiences to identify facts from past projects that validate the intuition.?
Confirm that ego doesn’t affect your decision-making. Project decision-making isn’t about who is right or wrong. Nor is it a competition. It’s about compiling the biggest collection of thoughts and experiences and using those to generate the best decision. If the best decision is made, the project wins. And if the project wins, the project team wins.
Determine the approach to take if you cannot agree. When managing a project, a no-decision creates an outcome, and it’s rarely the best outcome. A decision needs to be made, even if a disagreement results. Discuss how you both can be comfortable going forward when in dispute with a key team member. Comfort can come from additional tracking approaches or communications that confirm progress and show how the outcome is developing. Doing so when in disagreement helps a) ensure you and your team member’s opinions are valued and b) allows you to change your decision if the outcome you intended isn’t coming to fruition.
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Tuesday, February 4, 2025 5:00pm AEST, Brisbane time
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This Office Hours discussion will examine the challenges involved in leading from the role of technical expert. Leadership doesn’t require being in the managerial organization chart, but being accepted as a leader when you’re a technical expert has its challenges. Often, such specialists face skeptical or insecure managers intimidated by technology and their knowledge. Despite this, there are ways the technical expert can excel at leading an organization. Join me and Beata Jonik-Nowak, who has a PhD in Molecular Biology and is currently the project manager for “Vision 2026”, a framework driving Business Excellence in Global Quality Management at Fresenius Kabi. We’ll talk about the journey to leadership from the role of technical expert and provide tips for making such a transition easier for you. Feel free to bring your career direction questions; we’ll answer them live! During this Office Hours session, you’ll hear about:
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Additional thoughts can be found in my project management and outsourcing classes on LinkedIn Learning, including:
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This article is part of Bob’s Reflections newsletter series, which discusses project management, outsourcing, and “intelligent disobedience”, a leadership approach. If you want more of this content, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article is posted.
Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library or check out https://intelligentdisobedience.com/
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Inspiring Leaders and Teams to achieve peak performance
1 个月Insightful, thanks Bob! The underpinning objective of maintaining a constructive relationship shines through your advice. It is clear that there may be times that the PM/Manager has confidential information that may not be shared-able. With a strong relationship, a manager can achieve an accord where they ask their experts to ‘trust the process’ until things can clear up. This also means that the manager takes a bit of pressure off agreement and works on clarity and understanding.