High-Performing Project Team: Essential Strategies for Successful Collaboration

From comic book heroes to C-suite executives, everyone knows the importance of assembling the right team for the job. Unfortunately, building a high-performing project team isn’t as easy as film montages make it look. There are a lot of resources, tools, and methods out there that can help you run your project management team, and it can get overwhelming fast.

So before you dive into the nitty-gritty, start with these three simple strategies. They’re fundamental elements of collaboration and will give you a solid foundation for building a successful project team.

1: Establish project team roles and responsibilities to remove ambiguity

This might seem obvious, but it’s something a lot of project teams still get wrong. It’s not enough to hand out tasks and titles. Your project management team — from project sponsors to program managers to business analysts — needs to have a specific and detailed understanding of what they’re expected to contribute to the project. These are core project management skills that will save everyone a lot of time and frustration.

One of the best ways to establish team roles is to use a responsibility assignment matrix (RAM). A responsibility assignment matrix lets you clearly define, assign, and visualize different project objectives and deliverables. This makes it much easier for each project stakeholder to understand what they’re responsible for and how involved they need to be in each deliverable.

There are a few variations of the RAM out there, but the RACI matrix is one of the most popular. It cleanly diagrams roles based on four categories of accountability that can be applied to both the overall project and related tasks:

• Responsible: Who is doing the actual work?
• Accountable: Who owns the deliverable?
• Consulted: Whose direct input is needed to make the deliverable successful?
• Informed: Who needs to be kept in the loop?

There are also several RACI alternatives that might work better for your specific project team. Regardless of which model you use, responsibility assignment matrices are a great way to equip your team for success on day one.

2: Create psychological safety and empower your team

You assembled a project team because you knew you needed the input, effort, and experience of everyone involved. But without an environment where everyone feels comfortable being honest and proactive with their ideas and opinions, this benefit is greatly diminished.

To get the best from your people, you need to put effort into creating psychological safety for your project team. Psychological safety essentially means your team feels comfortable speaking up, sharing feedback, and offering ideas without fear of punishment, humiliation, or rejection. Many elements go into creating this environment, but a few key ones are:

Make space for everyone’s contributions

There are several reasons people might not feel comfortable speaking up in meetings. To get the most benefit from a diverse team, team leaders need to make sure everyone is heard and respected. This is particularly important for women, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ folks, and introverts, who are all less likely to share valuable insights due to workplace biases. Learn how to run inclusive meetings that make it comfortable for your whole team to engage.

Foster growth through feedback

Be generous with praise and constructive with your feedback when someone makes a mistake or doesn’t meet expectations. Be collaborative instead of confrontational when addressing problems. You’re all on the same team, and it’s you versus the problem, not you versus subordinates or contributors from other teams.

Encourage innovation through experimentation

Create an environment where team members can experiment and take controlled risks without fear of backlash if their experiments don’t work as planned. Recognize and reward effort as well as results, so that your project team doesn’t miss out on a great idea by feeling like they have to play it safe.

3: How to choose tools that support your project team’s natural workflows

There is a lot of great project management software out there, and even more articles listing and comparing this software. And as any project manager knows, you’re never using just one piece of software, either. Every project team needs a tech stack that empowers them to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate effectively.

If you want specific software recommendations, Slack did a roundup of the best project management software for 2024. However, even the most consistently high-ranked project management app might not be the best one for your specific project team. The best tools for you are the tools that fit naturally into your team’s ecosystem and workflow, so as not to create additional barriers to working effectively. To identify these tools, start by asking yourself these questions:

What makes sense for the company as a whole?

Too often, tools become siloed by department. While that’s necessary in some cases (your development team doesn’t need a CRM), the best project management software will be valuable and usable for multiple teams, especially when you’re managing a cross-functional project. To ensure your project’s tech stack can be truly collaborative, talk with stakeholder teams to learn what tools they use and what’s important to their workflows.

How can you make your existing software more collaborative?

In a cross-functional project, individual subject matter experts will use many different tools (such as design tools, databases, and code repositories). One way to increase visibility and collaboration is to choose tools with features and modes that allow other teammates to review, comment, and even work side-by-side in the app.

How can you avoid communication silos?

Collaboration is hindered when important knowledge is locked away in inboxes and direct messages. A collaborative communications tool like Slack lets you discuss your project in a dedicated project channel. With a project channel, team members can easily jump into conversations to quickly and seamlessly collaborate on issues. These conversations are then available for everyone to review later for insights or further discussion. Slack also enriches communication with features like document sharing and huddles.

People are the key to performance

There’s so much more that could be said about equipping your project team for success, but at the end of the day, the ultimate strategy for building a high-performing project team is to choose the right people and empower them with the structure, culture, and tools they need to do their best work.

Learn more about how to optimize your communications with Slack.