I’ve mentioned that I got my first project management role because I loved to build relationships and bring people together. I seldom worked alone and I firmly believed in the power of ‘we’ over ‘I’. Knowing no better, I maintained this approach in my new role, hoping it would keep working, and it did. Indeed, it turned out that working together was key to our success.

The best part of project management isn’t completing the project, it’s knowing you brought a team of people together and collectively created something special. Teamwork is often taken for granted in project management. Organisations believe they can throw together a bunch of people in a project team and that magic will happen.

Sometimes it does, but only if the person leading the team invests the time and effort in understanding each personality and uses techniques and skills to create an environment that supports different ways of working. Such project managers don’t think of their needs when doing this, they think of the collective.

There must be a shared vision, collective ownership and responsibility for progress, and a willingness to challenge each other to be better. The team will then think and talk in terms of ‘we’. In this they’ll be led by you. If you think and talk in terms of ‘you’, you are distancing yourself from the collective and passing responsibility across to the person you’re addressing, who may feel they will be blamed if the task doesn’t go as planned.

When you think and speak in terms of ‘I’, you are shouldering a lot of the responsibility yourself and there’s a danger that you’ll focus on the detail of the project rather than the job of managing it. The team may also be left with the impression that you’ll also take credit for the collective success of all they achieve.

When you think and talk in terms of ‘they’, you are distancing yourself from the team and risk becoming alienated from the very thing you need to get the job done successfully. It can create a barrier, and while the team may get the work done they’ll be doing it in spite of you. As Dwight D. Eisenhower said, ‘It’s better to have one person working with you than three people working for you’.

Project leaders think and talk in terms of ‘we’. They create a team with a shared purpose and responsibility for success and failure. A team that accepts all personalities, skills, knowledge and circumstances. A team committed to being the difference they want to see in others and to creating an experience like no other. A team that is happier and therefore (according to a study by the University of Warwick in the UK) up to 12 per cent more productive.

In his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni argues, ‘Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare’. Never is this more apparent than in your projects, and those that have it succeed. Every time.

It’s not enough to build the team, though — you have to care for them too.

A study by the Centre for Creative Leadership recently found that leadership failure is primarily caused by different kinds of emotional incompetence. The three key ones are poor interpersonal skills, difficulty in handling change and inability to work well in a team. The impact of these traits in our workplaces and projects continues to baffle and frustrate me. In my experience, the number one reason people leave their job is because of their boss. For me, though, leaving is better than moaning about it endlessly. Being English, I’ll admit that moaning is our national sport, so it’s always hard to resist it. My dad, though, is a quadruple gold medallist.

Most people don’t get up in the morning determined to do a rubbish job — in fact I’ll go out on a limb here and say no one does. Sure, there may be the odd personality clash or grievance, or the Dunning–Kruger effect (see chapter 1) might be in full flow, but we still have a sense of pride in what we do.

It’s the project manager’s job to ensure that the team feel cared for and involved, or, as HR like to call it these days, ‘engaged’. There. Done. Simple, right?

Apparently not. Some US$11 billion is lost every year as a result of employee turnover, and the impacts that can have on projects can be huge. If you don’t start finding different ways to engage your project team, it’s likely that this statistic will get worse.

According to a 2015 survey from Deloitte, Millennials entering the workforce place far greater emphasis on employee wellbeing and employee growth and development, compared with present-day priorities of personal income/reward and short-term financial goals. They want to be mentored, coached and developed. They want to be opened up to new opportunities and to be able to grow into a role. This is what excites employees and enhances their loyalty to you, the project and the organisation.

Successful organisations build cultures that foster friendship and caring within their teams. Ever worked in a team where you felt you could share your opinions without judgement? The kind of team where people cared for each other? Now, I get that some people are uncomfortable with the use of terms like caring and love in the office, so find different ways to say it, but make sure it’s practised.

And remember that introverts and extroverts need different approaches. In general, introverts prefer:

• private conversations to public ones
• time to think
• few interruptions
• privacy

while extroverts prefer:

• compliments
• options
• encouragement
• talking things over publicly.

To build a great team you first need to learn how to care for them individually and collectively. Only then will you have their permission to create something unique.