Fixing Your Project Management Team's Approach to Change - For Real

Ask nearly any project manager how to help a team “learn from their mistakes” and you’re bound to hear a variation on this:

“I have team members document their successes and roadblocks. By writing down and talking about their past experiences, we all learn from them for next time.”

Sounds good. Sounds…healthy, even.?

But something inside us says, “Wait a minute…”

That’s because we’ve done this very exercise with clients for many, many years. And we’ve heard stories about corporate and government teams who dutifully document past project experiences, in order to “learn from their mistakes.” But how often have we seen it make an actual difference?

The answer, we’re sad to report, is?not often. In fact, it’s closer to?hardly ever.?

It’s more about behavior than process

We can all go through the motions of “learning from our mistakes.” But acknowledgement doesn’t equal change. What does it take to not only learn but?implement that learning in a way that makes future work more effective?

We propose, based on experience and years of observation, that things don’t change when you make a note of what worked and what didn’t. It makes everyone feel better. It feels hopeful. But it doesn’t do anything.

Why? Because it doesn’t address?behavior.

In the Harvard Business Review, Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats?write?that organizations routinely derail their own learning process by focusing too much on success, acting too quickly, trying too hard to fit in, and relying too much on experts.?

Steering your team away from these tendencies requires something deeper than a list of future do’s and don’ts.

So, how?do?you encourage behavior change?

After decades in the business, we believe pain is the best teacher. Tiny habits? Atomic habits? Sure. But a few books can’t make a whole person—or a whole team—change course.?Experiencing?failure?inspires change.?

When a project flops or an approach just didn’t work, that’s your cue. It means you need to grow. It means you need to change.?

Once you’ve acknowledged the pain and distanced yourself from the awkwardness of failing, you can make more neutral observations about what actually happened and?identify?what went wrong and what can be done differently in the future.??

And once you can identify it, you can?implement?the slow, steady development of new habits you need to make?lasting change. Approaching a project postmortem with the intent to?experience,?identify, and?implement?will help your team become new kinds of workers: people who can do things differently without getting stuck.

Steps to real change

Avoiding bad choices isn’t enough to create change. Gino and Staats, the authors of the?Harvard Business Review article, name four ways leaders can help their team make long-lasting changes:

Destigmatize failure.

“Organizations,” the authors assert, “don’t develop new capabilities—or take appropriate risks—unless managers tolerate failure and insist that it be openly discussed.”

Don’t punish mistakes. Use them as an opportunity to learn. It’s cliché, we know. But it’s true—and truly difficult to fully adopt.?

As leaders, we’re under pressure to produce, save money, and deliver, deliver, deliver. When a mistake puts a deliverable in peril, it’s tempting to default to an “easy” fix: an angry or frustrated tone, taking over the work ourselves, punitively assigning someone else to the task.

But mistakes are the way your team will grow and become more effective as time goes on. Mistakes, as Neil Gaiman put it in?his popular 2012 commencement address, prove that you’re?doing?something. “Make interesting mistakes,” he concludes, “make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes.”?

As a leader, convey to your team that mistakes are not only okay but important—that they are, in fact, the way forward.

Embrace and teach a growth mindset.

Managers and employees can benefit from changing the way they think about learning. A growth mindset encourages teams to seek out challenges, look for paths to self-improvement, and to persist when a project becomes challenging.?

By modeling a growth mindset and openly encouraging it in team members, managers can normalize the process of growth and change while redefining what success means. Formally and informally, praise your team members’ process and emphasize that honing their skills over time is a worthwhile—and valued—path.

Consider potential when hiring and promoting.

One global firm identified a person’s “potential for improvement” as a major factor in future success, Gino and Staats report. “After a two-year project that drew on academic research and interviews, they identified four elements that make up potential: curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination.” When the firm compared high-potential candidates with their peers, they found that high-potential candidates performed better, thanks to their “openness to acquiring new skills and their thirst for learning.”

Shifting your focus from “accomplished” to “full of potential” when you hire and promote will help you fill your team and leadership positions with capable, forward-thinking, energetic people.

Use a data-driven approach to identify what caused success or failure.

Collect data after each project—whether it launched without a hitch or fell apart halfway through. Go over the data. Analyze it. Look for patterns. Discover what went right and what didn’t and incorporate it into your findings. Using data to explore what happened can reveal surprising insights.

Just make sure you’re not tweaking the data to serve a predetermined narrative. Gino and Staats note that they have “worked with all too many organizations where ‘data-driven decision making’ is code for contorting the facts until they reveal whatever senior management expects to see. It’s the role of leaders to ensure that they and other executives are sensitive to this tendency and don’t succumb to it.”

What we want to hear

Implementing these changes is all well and good but it won’t happen unless you also have solid systems in place to help your team recount their experiences, identify challenges and successes, and implement changes.

We’ve been to countless “lessons learned” meetings with clients and you know what we want to hear? The real experiences of your team. What went wrong? What?hurt??

Don’t talk to us about agile versus waterfall. Don’t list the challenges as if you’re reading a report. Put your notes away and tell us?what happened.

Then, tell us what you’d say about these:

• This is the actual behavior we want to change.
• These are our two top priorities for growth.
• This is what success would look like, by phase. This is how we’ll achieve it, using incremental steps.
• Here’s what we can measure to hold ourselves accountable.
• This is our new OCM consultant who will advise us on creating new behaviors when old ones emerge.
• This is our team MOU that establishes our group agreements, norms, and acceptable behaviors.
• These are the behaviors we’ve asked our quality assurance vendor to show us when we veer off course.
• To make our changes permanent, here are the activities and events that we will anchor our new practices to.

Once you’ve worked through these kinds of thought-provoking exercises and committed to systems that will keep you accountable to change, your team will be in a much better position to not only make changes based on past mistakes but will be better prepared for learning from mistakes in the future.