10 Tips for Managing Relationships with Your Project Customers and with Your Team

June 2011, by PM-Partners group

It is important for project managers to develop a competency in maintaining trustworthy relationships with key stakeholders, including your project team and customer representatives. These relationships can entail a certain amount of risk, and often consume a lot of time and energy.

In their seminal text, “The Trusted Advisor”, Maister, Green & Galford argue that an effective account manager must demonstrate "credibility, reliability, intimacy and a low concern for self."

These relationships develop over time, not only requiring a certain level of decorum and enthusiasm from the client manager, or project manager, but also the ability to deliver quality products to deadlines and the ability to reach your client’s expectations as best as possible.

What are the benefits of maintaining trusted relationships?

If you are trusted by stakeholders, they will begin to seek your advice and be more inclined to follow your recommendations before, during and after the project. As you become involved in more projects, these will become more strategic initiatives with greater visibility and reward. Your firm track record will mean that if you make a mistake when taking a risk, your stakeholders will forgive you more readily and will make sure that next time you are involved in the project as early on as possible to pre-design the strategy and to serve as a major architect of the project plan.

Here are the 10 tips in managing relations within the project.

1. Prove that you can deliver.

Coming to the project with a firm reputation of past achievements and experience demonstrates to your stakeholders that they can trust you with their project. Your team will recognise your project management expertise, including your technical competence and knowledge of the business, as they work with you. These core abilities and confidence will ensure that you receive the respect and commitment necessary from your team to drive the project forward. The loyalty and enthusiasm of your team is absolutely necessary if you wish to efficiently manage your project and deliver stunning results.

2. Ensure the team’s active engagement early on by articulating the scope and business risks clearly to your team, and asking for their opinion and insights.

Involving your team in the decision making process means that they will assume their assigned tasks with pride. Each of them will take on the responsibility to deliver their work as a matter of their reputation – as opposed to a blind task that they were assigned to complete on a deadline.

An understanding of the background of the project for all team members will also make the role of the project manager in defining, tracking, updating and reporting the cost and time of the project easier and with greater accuracy. On the other hand, a firm and trusting relationship with team members will make it easier for staff to admit their mistakes or concerns early on in the project, allowing the manager to address the issue, before it adversely affects the whole project.

3. Invest in understanding your people and developing your team.

Project teams usually have to work through painful and inefficient processes of trying to achieve their goals, while also trying to resolve the relationship issues that inevitably arise.  In fact, some teams never make it to the ‘performing’ level of effectiveness.

Good project managers provide early and ongoing development to the team, realising diversity of people in the team, apply various management and leadership styles and approaches.

4. Demonstrate your reliability to the client. Reliability is the key component of creating sustainable and trusting client relationships.

Providing status reports with updates of the project’s progress, responding to clients’ emails and consistent management of project processes are a sure-fire way to create a consistent reputation as a project manager. Needless to say that data in your reports must be absolutely accurate, as project manager can undo their credibility quite quickly if he or she is not reliable and consistent.

5. Manage your attitude, behaviours, and presentation.

Reliability and the aforementioned ‘credibility’ described above are not the only ingredients for a friendly and trusting relationship with clients. Despite the efforts of the project manager, if the client’s impression of them is that they are inexperienced, or opportunistic, this will have a negative impact on the project and on the flexibility of the client. The project manager’s attitude, behaviours, and presentation all present cues that the client will interpret in different ways. They will assess the personality of the project manager and determine whether, deep down, they can really trust this person.

6. Show that you sincerely care about the project’s success

A method to subvert any negative assumptions that the client may have is for the project manager to show that they sincerely care about the project’s success. If the client feels that the manager’s energies and her own hopes and goals are invested in the project, then he will feel more at peace leaving the project in her ‘trusting hands’.

7. Develop a personable relationship with the most important stakeholders.

The key people will be able to put a face to a name, and if they agree with the motivations and their impression of the project manager, they will throw their supportive weight behind her and her decisions. In the event when the project may be quite large and require a dynamic set of labour and funding resources, this support will be invaluable to get things done. And to allow for ingenuity and innovation within project, this support is absolutely essential for approvals.

8. Establish rapport with the higher management, too.

Take the time to develop good relationships with senior management involved with the project, it will reward you in spades down the track. Find opportunities to develop intimacy with key partners, but use sound judgement in this approach.

9. Listen first, then respond.

A successful project manager will hone their consultative leadership skills. Create empathy with your client by allowing them to finish what they are saying, checking your understanding of situation, reserving judgement and blame, withholding unsolicited advice, listening actively and taking seriously their concerns and needs. When people recognise that you are that kind of person – empathic yet assertive, ready to step into the other’s shoes, focusing on people and inspiring trust, people will mobilise to back you up and to struggle for shared aspirations.

10. Put stakeholder’s interest above your own.

The best project managers realise that their agendas are linked to others’. Their checked egoism will regard all stakeholders on an equal footing, no matter what their level, and will see them all as an essential piece of the final puzzle of the project. Finding opportunities to praise team members in public and expressing interdependent reliance on others for the success of the project and showing sincere appreciation of work done will all reflect her abilities as a responsible and credible manager. Good project managers do not simply assign tasks. They share these tasks with team members – showing that people have the manager’s support behind them and that they are not just a cog in the wheel.

Enrol in a project management course to learn how to manage your projects, and your relationships, effectively.