A project team is usually a group of people who come together to achieve the common objectives of the project by supporting the project manager in this endeavor. Below are some of the most common scenarios I have observed in my environment while working as a project manager. If you too have observed this in your environment, it means you have a diverse team. Sooner or later you will have to figure out a way to support diversity and inclusion within your team.
- The team members that are part of the project can be part of the internal or external organization
- Most of the team members are with different years of experience and different skill sets.
- They usually have different cultural backgrounds
- They might even speak different languages.
- There are occasions when you have different teams from different organizations working toward the same project objectives
How to handle some of these challenges and support diversity and inclusion in your team ?
If you have members in your team that speak different languages then as a PM you need to make sure that there is a common language established and agreed upon by everyone that will be used as base language for all communications.
As a PM you might face multiple complexities while trying to integrate different teams depending on their team and process maturity. A PM needs to ensure this happens by maintaining their corporate culture and without increasing any project risks.
The PM needs to :
- You need to make sure that you are very well aware of the current situation of the team. Try reflecting on your current situation.
- Make sure you are able to define concrete goals and then plan your actions accordingly.
- Build an environment where mutual trust prevails
- Inculcate a feeling of belongingness amount team members
- As a PM you need to encourage diversity and inclusion in the communication that you make
- Make sure a positive inclusive environment exists in the team
- We should always try to leverage diversity and inclusion to innovate the projects you are working on as a team
- Conduct team-building activities to ensure there are no gaps between members
- Promote team bonding
- Just implementing and thinking that everything you’re doing is perfect won’t help. You need to evaluate and monitor your progress every week.
You can get more information about this on this beautiful post on linkedin.
