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John Strickland has over 25 years of experience leading major design-build and construction management projects, is an active member of a Construction Industry Institute (CII) research team and serves as a CH2M HILL Lean Construction leader.聽 That experience has provided plenty of evidence that the attitudes that prevail on a project team are as critical as the mechanics of project management.

Here John reflects on how shaping a positive collective project team attitude begins with the mindset of each individual team member:

Reliability and keeping promises are important things to most people.聽 We all like to think of ourselves as 鈥渉ighly reliable鈥� and speculate the world would be a better place if only those around us were similarly virtuous.

Our own failures to keep promises are usually for good reasons 鈥� something came up that we hadn鈥檛 expected, or maybe somebody else failed in their promise to us, which caused us to not come through.聽 We are, after all, generally very reliable.

When others fail to keep a promise or meet our expectations, however, we have a tendency to attribute the failure to a character flaw 鈥� 鈥渢hat person simply isn鈥檛 reliable鈥� – and start basing our decisions, and our behavior toward the person, on that faulty attribution.聽聽If this happens on a frequent basis (which it frequently does), the culture of the job degrades.

The continuous improvement philosophy of Kaizen emerged at the end of World War II to reinvigorate Japan鈥檚 shattered morale as well as its shattered economy.聽 That鈥檚 why Kaizen offers more than the mechanics of productivity improvement.聽 Kaizen couples a positive mental attitude toward change with continuous improvement systems that support change.聽 The philosophy promotes nurturing and rewarding workers who contribute to improved teamwork in positive ways.

My experience over the years has been that when every member of a project team truly believes that suggestions for improvement are not being wielded as weapons of criticism but rather opportunities for growth and change, the results can be anywhere from impressive to outright amazing.

Lots of friction, hard feelings and sub-optimal results could be avoided if we improved our ability to communicate requests and commitments clearly and maintained an 鈥渁ssumption of positive intent鈥� mindset.聽 Positive change breeds positive performance.