Reflection on “Negating Negativity by David Whitemyer, September 2012”

This article discussed the negativity and its impact of the team performance through the life span of the project. Most of the times negativity generates more negativity, and that is why project managers should control that type of energy and make sure that it stays under control, knowing that in complex projects the negativity can spread even faster due to the large numbers of the stakeholders. And In order for the project manager to keep that negativity level under control, that requires a full understanding of each role on the project and recognizing that each stakeholder should be approached in a different way.

When it comes to the team members, the project manager should make them feel accepted, and find out the reason behind their anger and resistance if they have any. The project manager should understand the capacity of each member and assign tasks accordingly, taking into consideration that if someone still don’t want to work on the project, letting him/her might be the only option left. However, dealing with the rest of the stakeholders can be very challenging because in complex projects, their numbers tend to be large, and understanding the mentality of each group, and sometimes each individual, can be very difficult.

On the other hand, negative sponsors are the most sensitive situation as they have the power and authority to kill a project right away, and so the project managers should be very careful, and try to do everything his/her team is obliged to do under the contract, and politely reject anything else the sponsor ask for. All that makes me interested in knowing more about the Human Resources aspect of the project; where the project manager knows how to motivate his team members and how to get into their heads and understand what are the fears for each one of them, and that took me back to the Maslow theory about the psychological needs for human beings, and I find that a very important topic to read about.

I have noticed from my own experience that negativity and negative feelings can spread really fast among the team members, especially at the submittal

times; whenever there was a design package submittal, knowing that the structural design projects are usually divided to phases, any negative word can have a great impact, because the team members would be already stressed out. I found out that the submittals times are always stressful, and no matter what your schedule is, people will remain stressed at that critical date, it seems that the work will extend to what the schedule allows it to, and I could say almost every time there was a submittal, we find something that needed to be changed on that day, it is more like if something can go wrong, it will. So my job was to keep everything under control, and even make extra effort that day to keep them focused and feel like we are all in this together; small things could do a great difference, such as taking the team members to lunch, even if it has to go out from my personal money, it would the trick!

Some of the lessons that I learned from this article is that most conflicts happen because some stakeholders are not sure about a particular thing, or what we call the fear from the known. I also learned that sometimes the problem of negativity is found within the project manager because of his behavior and that is being translated within the team; some managers are cynical, rigid, defiant, arrogant, or apathetic, and each one of these has a huge negative impact of the team members and so on the project and its outcomes.