Motivation can make a mediocre group shine. As project manager, it's your job to bring out the best in the people you're leading. Assume that your group has the necessary skills (or can acquire them) to do an exemplary job, and set your sights on glory. You can make this a productive team where everyone gladly shifts other responsibilities in order to be at team meetings and meet deadlines. With the right motivation, your team can produce better quality work more quickly and more consistently than they ever have before.

Get to Know Your Team
Who are these people that you're trying to motivate? What personal issues are they dealing with while trying to concentrate on work? You don't need to know every gossipy detail, but you do need to know who's able to spend extra time on a project, who can work through lunch in a crunch, and who's just been diagnosed with a serious medical condition and will be missing a lot of work for medical tests and appointments.

Pay attention to the skills that each member brings to the team. Lots of tasks don't need to be carried out by any one person in particular, so encourage people to stretch themselves and volunteer for some little piece of the project that they haven't ever tackled before.

Encourage and Model Good Communication
When you're setting up a meeting, give at least a week's notice and ask everyone to respond to your notification. Investigate immediately if someone hasn't replied within two days. If you have t re-schedule, do it immediately, before people have made plans around the preliminary time slot.

At meetings, take notes or ask someone else to, and then be sure that everyone gets a copy of those notes either that day or the next, along with a request to notify you if there's an error in the notes. These often don't have to be official minutes, but they should be an accurate record of what decisions were made at the meeting and of who agreed to do what by when.

If a question comes up from one team member, resolve it and let the rest of the team know about the concern and its outcome. Very often, if one member has a question, others do as well, but lots of people don't bother to ask - they just wait to see what happens. When someone takes the initiative to ask a question, try to take the approach that there's no such thing as a stupid question and do what you can to make the questioner feel good about having asked. Expressing appreciation for genuine concerns will engender an open culture in which

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