For my Teams and Communication interview I decided to interview my father, Bruce Hennen. Currently, he is working as a project director for a real estate development firm based in Indonesia. To provide a little background, he has worked in the region a number of times over the past two decades on the project management for a number of successful projects. The interview was conducted over Skype, and the audio is linked at the bottom of the post. It's not great quality (audio and interviewing), so the answers here are tightly paraphrased to keep this post concise.
1. What position do you hold?
BTH: Project director on a real estate development project. In the hierarchy, this is second from the top, behind the company owners.
2. How many people are on your work team?
BTH: My core team consists of about 10 people who I speak to almost daily. In the core project management team there are 15 people, one of whom manages the remaining 50 people in the project management team.
3. What is the largest team you've been a part of?
BTH: As for a team where we were all direct equals, probably when I was working in San Francisco as a structural engineer with 8-10 colleagues. Otherwise, the current project management team of 65 is the largest.
4. Do you manage any employees directly? How many?
BTH: I'm currently directly managing 7 directors of the different departments on the project.
5. How would you define effective communication
BTH: Effective communication is all about clarity, when topics and problems are shared and understood. Defining the task is the first step, and collaboration to solve the problem is the next. Delegation of responsibility and establishment of clear time goals are also important to success.
Me: In one word, the most important trait of effective communication?
BTH: Clarity! Definitely the most important thing. It's not very easy to find here in Indonesia, because of cultural reasons. It's one of the reasons why most westerners have a lot of trouble here trying to work in management roles.
6. Do you consider yourself to be an effective communicator?
BTH: With people that speak English, yes. With people who speak Indonesian, no! *laughs*
Me: What about Indonesians who speak English? Can you bridge the culture gap?
BTH: Yeah, most of the Indonesians I work with I've worked with for a while. The hierarchy is well recognized and respected so things get communicated and done, but you need to follow up on some things.
7. Have you ever been on a team with someone you consider a 'bad' communicator? How were they bad?
BTH: Absolutely, yes! The person was upstream of me, so an owner of the project I was working on. He never respected people's time, number one. Number two, he was always late to meetings and required rehashing in order to get him up to speed. He was also took a dictatorial approach to things.
Me: What about other forms of communication, such as e-mail?
BTH: We communicated rather efficiently this way actually. I could write communications in forms looking for yes or no or go or no go, and get his decision with little discussion or trouble.
8. In your team, what are your primary methods of communication?
BTH: In the core team right around me, probably half e-mail and half in person, since we're in the same office. With external teams, 99% email. In person meetings are expensive and rare and are generally reserved for important negotiation or decision making. Text messaging is more or less synonymous with e-mail in this context. All e-mails are formal, as they're generally prescriptive instructions of some sort.
9. How is your team structured? Hierarchy or self-managed?
BTH: Definitely a hierarchy.
10. How open is your manager (if they have defined leadership roles) to input on projects?
BTH: I directly report to the CEO of the public company. He happens to be involved in this project directly but normally he's overseeing many projects and takes a very superficial view.
Me: What about budget issues? I remember you mentioning those before.
BTH: No issues at the moment, but the budget started too low. We were supposed to build a 5 star hotel, but the budget was for one or two stars lower. I did make it clear up front that the budget was too low and they accepted my input, but they still decided to go forward with the project. Usually the owners start to realize the budget is too low when we're in the middle of the project, and then adjustments have to be made. It's an inefficient way of doing things, but it seems to be the trend with this group, anyway!
11. How often do you receive/give feedback?
BTH: We do have performance reviews every 6 months using the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) system. It's a rather new addition to the company conducted by the HR department.
12. If you had critical feedback to give, how would you deliver it?
BTH: I would do it directly, but casually. I try to be as immediate as possible when bringing the issue up and frame the conversation as trying to solve a problem rather than a simple critique.
13. Have you ever needed to mediate between team members in conflict?
BTH: In the early stages of The Peak project in 2007, I was on a three person core team. We were all more or less equal in the hierarchy. The other two members of this group did not like each other! They never came to the meetings together and tried to undo each others work. My biggest challenge was getting them into the same room together to make a decision.
Me: What characterized the communication in these meetings?
BTH: When they came to the meeting together, I would usually make a direct effort to make sure that both of their opinions were known. I would invite the other person to give their opinion to basically say 'Give me your comments now because I don't want to have to work through them after a decision has already been made'
14. In your opinion, what distinguishes a high performing team from an average team?
BTH: Synergy. I always try to build on people's strengths when delegating tasks to them.
Me: What about in terms of communication?
BTH: I think that as a team works together we begin to understand our shortfalls and strengths and weaknesses, and we understand each others' personal nuances to improve communication. At first this project was a bit difficult because all the people but one were new, but that goes away after a while.
15. What does or what could your organization do to enhance team productivity?
BTH: Being an effective communicator. Almost all the problems we've encountered on this project were due to insufficient or unclear communication.
Although we used the term 'team' throughout the interview, 'group' seemed like a more appropriate word to describe the 15 person core team he mentioned in the interview, as they don't actually share any specific functions, and spend most of the time delegating to and managing people lower down in the hierarchy, and communicating upwards. Even so, it is abundantly clear that clear, concise communication is still key to getting tasks done and problems solved efficiently.
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