Execution 4 - Leadership and Influencing Skills

Google Project Management Certificate · Course 4: Project Execution - Running the Project

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A project manager is almost never the line manager of the people doing the work. The engineers, designers and analysts on the team report to someone else, so the authority to simply tell them what to do does not exist. What exists instead is influence, and this module is about earning it.

It runs in two halves. The first half is about the team: what a team actually is, which five factors make one effective, the concrete behaviours that build a high-functioning team, how teams develop over time through predictable stages, and what ethical and inclusive leadership look like in day-to-day practice. The second half is about influencing: the four steps that persuade someone to consider your idea, the mistakes that sabotage the attempt, and the organizational and personal sources of power you draw on.

The link between the halves is trust. Every practice in the first half - psychological safety, dependability, empathy, inclusion, ethical decisions - is what makes the influencing in the second half land. People help a project manager they trust, even though they do not report to them.

Note

Where this sits: this module is entirely about people rather than artefacts. There is no template or tracker here. The output is a team that works well together and stakeholders who say yes.

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Teams, workgroups and teamwork

Note

Team - a group of people who plan, solve problems, make decisions and review progress in service of a specific project or objective. The defining feature is that members rely on each other to get things done.
Workgroup - a grouping based on organizational or managerial hierarchy, where the work is coordinated, controlled or assigned by a single person or entity.

The distinction is about who coordinates with whom. A software engineering team building one seamless experience coordinates with the project manager and with each other. A quality assurance workgroup running a set of test plans has each tester assigned a plan by the group manager, and the testers work independently, coordinating mainly with the manager and with the development team of the feature they are testing. Both structures have real benefits inside an organization; this course is about teams.

Note

Teamwork - an effective collaborative way of working in which each person is committed to and heading towards a shared goal. It maximises each member’s individual strength to bring out the best in everyone.

Why teamwork matters

• It fosters creativity. Diverse perspectives, skills and experiences produce better solutions and products that address more diverse user needs than any of those people would have reached working alone.
• It encourages accountability. Knowing that your task directly affects everyone else’s tasks is a powerful motivator.
• It gets things done. Big, complex projects simply need capable people completing tasks and hitting milestones to reach the project goals.

Done right, teamwork improves both the measurable results and the team culture.

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The five factors of team effectiveness

Google researchers set out to identify what makes teams effective and found five factors, listed here in order of importance. Psychological safety is not just first on the list, it is the number one driver.

1. Psychological safetysafe to take interpersonal risks

2. Dependabilityreliable, work finished on time

3. Structure and clarityroles, plans, goals, consequences understood

4. Meaninga sense of purpose in the work or its results

5. Impactthe belief that the results matter and create change

Ranked by importance. The top factor is also the one a project manager most directly shapes through their own behaviour.

Factor	What it means	What the PM does about it
Psychological safety	An individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk. On safe teams people believe they will not be labelled ignorant, incompetent, negative or disruptive	Build a culture where teammates are comfortable taking risks, seeking differing opinions and resolving interpersonal conflict as it arises. One team’s shorthand for this: be direct and kind
Dependability	Members are reliable and complete their work on time	It takes setting, negotiating and meeting expectations. Communicate expectations clearly, and make sure the team feels able to negotiate back
Structure and clarity	Understanding job expectations, how to meet them, and the consequences of performance. Each person knows their role, plans and goals, and how their work affects the group	Track the project diligently. Sloppy, unorganised, incohesive tracking produces sloppy, unorganised, incohesive output and tension inside the team
Meaning	Finding a sense of purpose in the work itself or in its results	Recognise that the purpose differs per person: supporting themselves financially, helping the team hit its goals, or getting the product to a new community of users
Impact	The belief that the results of one’s work matter and create change	Help individuals see how they drive impact inside and beyond the team. Project tracking and milestones make that visible

Tip

The dependability example worth remembering: someone on your team is likely working across two or more projects with competing deadlines. If they are afraid to tell you about their constraints, the work on both projects suffers. If they can raise it, an open negotiation over priorities eases the load.

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Six ways project managers build high-functioning teams

Create systems that turn chaos into orderCommunicate and listenPromote trust and psychological safetyDemonstrate empathy and create motivationDelegate responsibility and prioritiseCelebrate team success

Systems that turn chaos into order

Create, implement and improve workflows and processes that are standardised, measurable, repeatable and scalable. If you find yourself constantly chasing teammates for progress, that is the signal to build a process for how and when someone reports a task as complete. The mental image from the course: it is a connect-the-dots puzzle with no numbers, just dots and a partial picture. You notice the dots, know which matter, string them together, and help everyone else see the whole project too.

Communicate and listen

Keep everyone on the same page about project status through daily or weekly update emails and regular team meetings. Meetings are also a listening space, for feedback on a workflow or questions from the group, and status emails can collect the same input from people who prefer to speak privately. Beyond the wider team, connect with individuals regularly, and learn how each person prefers to communicate: small talk with those who enjoy it, straight to the point with those who do not.

Promote trust and psychological safety

Team members need to trust that it is safe to speak up about the project or their own tasks. Schedule time in weekly status meetings for open, thoughtful, inclusive discussion, and model it yourself by asking the team for help with a problem. Encourage contributions regardless of role or rank, which signals that challenging a process and critiquing the plan are welcome from anyone. Giving and receiving feedback is uncomfortable but healthy, and it usually produces a better outcome.

Empathy and motivation

There is no I in team, but a team is still made of individuals with different motivations and lives outside work. Show empathy by being present, listening and asking questions, and in one-to-ones avoid assuming what the other person thinks or feels - stay quiet and curious and there is always more to learn. Create motivation by recognising good work publicly, in a meeting or a group email. Recognition tells people they are doing the right things. Recognise good work, not only heroic effort.

Delegate and prioritise

Delegating specific tasks lets teammates add value with their particular skills, and gives you room to focus on the project as a whole. Prioritising removes ambiguity: if you think a task is important and the team does not, they will work on whatever they like. Build consensus around priorities with the team and explain your rationale, because that buy-in increases commitment.

Celebrate success

Celebrate at the end and throughout, for big and small wins alike - a milestone reached, positive feedback from stakeholders. A group lunch, a small gift or a congratulatory email is enough. Celebration raises morale and engagement, and appreciated people work harder and perform better.

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Air cover

Note

Air cover - support for and protection of a team in the face of out-of-scope requests or criticism from leadership. It means prioritising the needs of your team over the wants of your stakeholders.

Project management is not only leading downwards; it is also managing the needs and expectations of stakeholders, sponsors and leaders above you. Air cover rests on a trusting relationship with those stakeholders, built by demonstrating that you can lead a team and communicate well. It carries risk: if you defend the team and they still fail to deliver, stakeholders may question your ability to run projects. So only push back when you are confident in the team’s progress towards the goal.

Worked example. You manage a supermarket coffee brand launching three new ground-coffee flavours - vanilla, hazelnut and mocha. Well into execution, the sponsor asks for a fourth, caramel. The team is already at maximum capacity and a fourth flavour would add unreasonable work and stress.

Saying no without saying no

• Push back gently, with a polite explanation that the request is not possible under the current scope, time and cost constraints.
• Offer to come back with an answer. That buys time to understand the request and consult trusted teammates on its benefits and costs, and occasionally the stakeholder reconsiders or forgets it entirely.
• Always offer alternatives. Maybe the timeline can expand, maybe a partner team can absorb the request. In the coffee case: the current timeline allows three flavours, and a fourth would push the launch back by two months.

A flat no frustrates the asker. Gentle pushback plus options protects the team and preserves the relationship.

Intervening from behind the scenes

The second technique is delicately handling unrealistic requests or unreasonable critiques without dragging the whole team into them. In the coffee example you do not call a team meeting about the caramel request, because knowing a stakeholder wants to increase their workload only adds stress. Instead you consult two trusted team members on a need-to-know basis. One of them knows two new flavours are slated for the autumn lineup six months out, so caramel could launch then - more development time for the team, and the sponsor still gets what they asked for. You present that alongside the delayed-launch option, and the sponsor accepts.

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Tuckman’s five stages of team development

Psychologist Bruce Tuckman’s model describes how a group of strangers becomes a high-functioning unit, and each stage asks something different of the project manager.

Forming

→

Storming

→

Norming

→

Performing

→

Adjourning

Forming and storming are the precarious stages, and the ones where deliberate attention to team dynamics pays off most.

Stage	What it feels like	Your job as PM
Forming	Everything is shiny and new. People are getting to know each other, eager to make a good impression, excited to start	Clarify project goals, roles and context. People are seeking guidance, so give it
Storming	Roles settle, work begins, disagreement and frustration surface. People object to inefficient processes, clash with teammates, differ on time and effort estimates, on levels of independence, and on which tasks to prioritise. Tasks turn out more complex than they looked	Focus on conflict resolution. Listen as the team works through problems and offer insight on how it could function better as a unit
Norming	Internal conflict is resolved by establishing new norms - processes and workflows that make getting things done easier. The team feels equipped to work together	Codify the norms, make sure everyone knows them and reinforce them. If solutions are discussed in the weekly meeting, budget agenda time for it every week
Performing	The team works together almost seamlessly, completing tasks, reaching milestones and progressing towards the goal	Delegate, motivate and give feedback to keep momentum up
Adjourning	The project wraps and the team disbands. Bittersweet	Set up time to celebrate the final milestones and the project’s success, and make sure each person knows what is next for them

Team dynamics

Note

Team dynamics - the forces, both conscious and unconscious, that impact team behaviour and performance.

The stages are a framework for reading those dynamics and adjusting your management style. It is tempting to assume a team can go full speed ahead from day one, but it is worth taking the time to understand the dynamics overall and how each individual fits in, especially through forming and storming. Three reasons managing dynamics matters:

• Teams contain differences. Different skill sets, varying degrees of autonomy and competing priorities. Your job is to forge consensus and set clear purposes, goals, dependencies and accountability, so the team can focus on the actual work.
• It creates a collaborative, psychologically safe environment. Safe team members help each other and accept help when they need it, which keeps schedules on track. Using the norming stage to build that collaboration gets you to performing faster.
• It shows you how to motivate people. Motivated members contribute more to discussions, finish their tasks and take part in project activities. A positive atmosphere makes people feel empowered, more comfortable taking calculated risks and more likely to look for innovative solutions.

Much of team dynamics happens under the surface, and naming the stage the team is in is what makes it visible.

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Influencing without authority in practice

A senior program manager’s account of the skill, from the module, is worth keeping as a checklist because it ties several threads together.

• The core soft skill is influencing without authority - communicating so people understand your goals and objectives and come along on a shared vision, whether or not you have management authority over them.
• The beginner’s mistake is doing everything yourself and not asking for help. The fix is delegating and working with others so subject matter experts do what they are genuinely good at.
• Delegate to people who enjoy the work. Find the people in the organization who like doing a particular thing, even when it is not formally their role, and hand it to them. That keeps you out of the weeds and on the overall project.
• Run inclusive meetings. If one or two participants are usually quiet, invite them into the conversation - better still, have a coffee beforehand and ask what they think of the upcoming topic. Otherwise the same voice dominates and diversity of thought disappears.
• Pair delegation with sponsorship and mentorship. Sponsorship means showcasing people’s best work across the project team, which lifts morale. Mentorship means giving a junior or less confident teammate smaller tasks to build confidence, or something enjoyable outside their normal work.

Tip

A second piece of career advice from the module, from a program manager whose mother was a school principal: deference gives you the experience to lead. A PM rarely holds the technical or domain expertise needed to build the thing, so leadership comes from working with every piece of the pie - the way a principal works with custodial staff, the PTA, teachers, the union and parents - and building a network of people who help get things done. The goal is making people feel seen and empowered, in service of a collective vision rather than your own.

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Ethical and inclusive leadership

Note

Ethical leadership - a form of leadership that promotes and values honesty, justice, respect, community and integrity.
Inclusive leadership - when everyone’s unique identity, background and experiences are respected, valued and integrated into how the team operates.

You promote ethical leadership by defining and aligning values within the team and showing how living by those values serves the organization’s mission. The example the module gives is recent workplace change: employees have been asking employers to adopt ethical policy changes and to state positions on current events, and companies respond ethically by creating forums where employees can raise viewpoints, be heard, and get follow-up from leaders.

The two are tightly linked. If ethical leadership creates the forum where concerns are heard, inclusive leadership puts what was heard into action, creating an environment that encourages and empowers every member of the community - which in turn produces more innovation and better solutions.

Diversity versus inclusion

Diversity is the set of differences each of us possesses, visible or invisible, that gives everyone a unique perspective on the world and their work. Inclusion is what the team does with that diversity of thought and perspective.

Three ways to lead inclusively

Foster a culture of respect

• Serve as a role model and set the tone
• Model the organization’s values
• Take appropriate action if misconduct occurs
• Make it comfortable to raise concerns
• Recognise team contributions regularly

Create equal opportunity to succeed

• Everyone gets the information and resources to do their best work
• Regular communication and accessible documentation
• Check-ins to listen, share, answer questions, support
• Spot work that suits someone who wants it but shies away from asking, by knowing their aspirations

Invite and integrate diverse perspectives

• Cultivate a culture where every perspective is openly shared and heard
• Integrate those perspectives into work-related decisions
• Build psychological safety as the precondition
• Invite thoughts, ideas and concerns regardless of role or rank

The habit

• These skills need regular practice
• They apply to a team of 2, 20 or 200
• The test: does the team feel safe, heard and valued?

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A framework for ethical decision-making

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Ethics - the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group. There is no single universally accepted set: standards differ by culture, community, profession, industry and organization, which is why most organizations publish a code of conduct setting the standards they hold employees to.

The module borrows a five-step framework from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. The running example: a vendor you have worked with before sends a generous holiday gift shortly before you are due to select a vendor for a task on your project.

1. Recognise an ethical issue. Ask whether the decision could negatively affect another person or group, and whether the issue goes beyond what is merely legal or efficient. Here: if you accept the gift, is anyone harmed?

2. Get the facts. Decide what you should do and seek answers, consulting the right people about all available options. Check whether the company has guidelines on gifts from external parties, and if not, ask your HR representative.

3. Evaluate alternative actions against five questions: which option produces the most good and the least harm, which best respects the rights of everyone with a stake, which treats people equally or proportionally, which best serves the community as a whole rather than just some members, and which lets me act as the sort of person I want to be. The answers are subjective, so it helps to canvass others. Here, the equal-treatment question points to declining, since accepting could sway who wins the contract.

4. Make a decision and test it by imagining the reaction of someone whose opinion you value - then actually discuss it with your manager, HR representative or a trusted colleague.

5. Act and reflect on the outcome. Carry the decision out thoughtfully and afterwards consider the results. Here: respectfully decline, giving the reason, such as a company rule against accepting gifts above a set value from vendors or contractors.

Tip

The payoff loops back to influence: if the people around you trust your decision-making, they are more likely to help you reach project goals even though you are not their manager.

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Influencing: Conger’s four steps

Note

Influencing - the ability to alter another person’s thinking or behaviours.

Leadership expert Dr Jay A. Conger, in The Necessary Art of Persuasion, sets out four steps. The worked example is an email to a partnership manager at a well-known chocolate manufacturer, proposing that Office Green’s Plant Pals customers can add a high-quality chocolate bar to each plant they buy.

Establish credibilitywhy should they listen to you?

Frame for common groundhow does this benefit them?

Provide evidencedata brought to life by story

Connect emotionallyshow investment, match their state

Applied across the whole conversation, and compressed into the opening influencing statement that sets it up.

Step	What it requires	The Office Green email
Establish credibility	Two sources: expertise (professional experience, extensive research, a history of sound judgement) and relationships (being honest, trustworthy and someone people want to work with, demonstrated over time). Lacking expertise is fixable through education, research or asking an expert	Greet by name, introduce your role as a lead project manager at Office Green, mention you have launched new services before, and name the shared contact who worked with you and can vouch for you
Frame for common ground	Make the case for how the idea benefits them, which needs a strong understanding of the audience and what they value. Listen carefully in meetings and conversations, then frame around their needs	Note that you have researched their organization, that the service aligns with their offerings, and that you admire their push to work with lifestyle and wellness brands
Provide evidence	Numbers are not strong enough alone - they need stories, examples and metaphors, and vivid language, to bring them to life and hold interest	Client surveys gauging interest in the offering showed their brand coming up again and again
Connect emotionally	Show that you are emotionally invested in the idea, and do your best to determine and match the audience’s emotional state	Reference their posts on chocolate and a well-balanced lifestyle, propose combining forces to reach a wider audience, and close in a friendly tone

Four common influencing mistakes

Approaching the audience too aggressively, which puts people off the idea entirelyResisting compromise, which any mutual agreement depends onOver-developing the argument and under-investing in the four stepsAssuming the agreement can be reached in a single conversation

The influencing statement

The four steps also compress into an opening statement that sets the stage. Carmen, a PM at a small marketing agency, wants an HR director to approve a role-specific onboarding process for new graphic designers, because the one-size-fits-all process leaves them without information on role-specific procedures and software. Note that her statement does not follow the canonical order:

• Provide evidence: 80 percent of recent graphic design hires rated onboarding negatively, and follow-up showed they lacked access to information that would help them settle in faster. The proposal is a digital welcome packet with design-specific documentation.
• Frame for common ground: leaders on the graphic design team agreed a design-specific process would raise new-hire productivity, since better-prepared hires take on projects sooner.
• Establish credibility: she built a similar role-specific process at a previous company, and it lifted new-hire satisfaction by 60 percent.
• Connect emotionally: joining a new company is overwhelming, and a smoother, more personal onboarding sets the tone for the support new hires can expect.

Tip

Advice from a diversity program manager in the module: work out what is in it for them and what impact the idea has on the business or the consumer, then frame the ask around that. Keep it simple - you hold all the background and every step, but your audience mainly needs to know when you will get there and roughly how, so do not drag them into the weeds. Pitch to the audience: a researcher wants data points, a marketing team wants the splashy high-level picture and the target demographics. And if the work does not excite you, it will not excite anyone else, so step back and reconsider what you are building.

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Sources of power

Approach is only half of influence. The rest comes from your sources of power. Researcher Terry Bacon, in The Elements of Power: Lessons on Leadership and Influence, found that most sources fall into two buckets, organizational and personal.

Organizational: role

• Your position within the organization or team
• A PM holds a certain power over the project, and therefore influence

Organizational: information

• Your level of access to and control over information
• A PM holds a great deal about the work and the stakeholders
• Do not assume the leader has all the answers - ask questions, consider every idea
• Share information regularly so the team can respond to the full picture

Organizational: network

• The people you are connected to professionally and personally
• Being visibly well-connected, with a good chance of winning support or budget approval, brings the audience onside
• Use your network to connect colleagues, which grows their influencing power too

Organizational: reputation

• How others perceive you overall
• Positive reputations are more influential than negative ones
• Built by collaborating well, being easy to work with, keeping commitments and helping others reach their goals

Personal sources: your superpowers

Source	What it covers
Knowledge	Power drawn from expertise in a subject, unique abilities and skill sets, and your ability to learn new things. Influential leaders usually know their field, and people trust their opinions. Reflect on the expertise you have and where you want to grow
Expressiveness	Your ability to communicate. Storytelling and connecting emotionally significantly increase your ability to influence
History	The personal history between you and another person. A strong existing relationship goes a long way, and managing team dynamics builds it
Character	Others’ view of the qualities that make you who you are - honesty, integrity, kindness. You draw an enormous amount of power from high estimates of your character

These four are not exhaustive: trustworthiness, authenticity and wisdom sit inside them too. The module’s own example of a superpower is curiosity: joining Google without a software engineering background, the instructor found the engineer with the most experience on each new team and asked to be taught how everything worked. Most people genuinely enjoy sharing what they know, so that first chat leads to lunches, which builds knowledge and history, and the introductions that follow build network. Identify your own superpowers and find the combination of influencing techniques that fits your circumstances.

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Revision summary

Tip

One-minute recap

• A team plans, solves problems, decides and reviews progress together, with members relying on each other. A workgroup is hierarchy-based, with work assigned and coordinated by one person. Teamwork fosters creativity, encourages accountability and gets things done.
• Five factors of team effectiveness, in order: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, impact. Psychological safety is the perception of the consequences of interpersonal risk, and it ranks first.
• Six PM behaviours: create systems that turn chaos into order, communicate and listen, promote trust and psychological safety, show empathy and create motivation, delegate and prioritise, celebrate success. Recognise good work publicly, not just heroics.
• Air cover protects the team from out-of-scope requests and criticism. Say no without saying no: gentle pushback, buy time, always offer alternatives. Intervene behind the scenes and loop in trusted teammates on a need-to-know basis. It needs stakeholder trust, and it carries risk if the team then misses.
• Tuckman’s stages: forming (clarify goals, roles, context), storming (resolve conflict), norming (codify the norms), performing (delegate, motivate, give feedback), adjourning (celebrate and tell people what is next).
• Team dynamics are the conscious and unconscious forces on behaviour and performance. Managing them forges consensus across different skills and priorities, creates a safe collaborative environment, and shows you how to motivate people.
• Influencing without authority is the core soft skill. Delegate to subject matter experts and to people who enjoy the work, run inclusive meetings, and pair delegation with sponsorship and mentorship.
• Ethical leadership values honesty, justice, respect, community and integrity; inclusive leadership respects, values and integrates everyone’s identity, background and experience. Diversity is the differences; inclusion is what the team does with them. Lead inclusively by fostering respect, creating equal opportunity to succeed, and inviting and integrating diverse perspectives.
• Ethical decision-making: recognise the issue, get the facts, evaluate alternatives against the five questions, make a decision and test it on someone whose opinion you value, then act and reflect.
• Conger’s four steps: establish credibility (expertise plus relationships), frame for common ground, provide evidence (numbers plus vivid story), connect emotionally (and match their state).
• Four influencing mistakes: too aggressive, resisting compromise, over-building the argument, expecting agreement in one conversation.
• An influencing statement compresses all four steps into the opening of the pitch. Know what is in it for them, keep it simple, and pitch to the audience.
• Organizational power: role, information, network, reputation. Personal power: knowledge, expressiveness, history, character. Find your own superpowers and practise using them.

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Next: Effective Project Communication → - meetings, emails and keeping a team informed.