When I review projects for my clients, one of the things I try to do is find the energy of the project team. While I also look for more traditional project indicators, those can sometimes mask both opportunities and threats to project success. As a project leader, it can be to your advantage to know whether your team is working with or against its energy. It is like writing with your non-dominant hand: You can do it, but it takes a lot more energy and the quality suffers unless you are ambidextrous. The approach I am suggesting is really more about discovery than measurement.

Begin by Making Contact
To find your project team's energy, begin by making contact with the individuals on your team. You can do this by talking with people individually or in small groups. Start by setting the context. One possible approach is to announce to everyone that you are looking for ideas about how to increase the quality of both their experience and yours during this project. Tell them you'd like to know from each of them what it's like working on this project from their perspective. This kind of announcement may be unusual in your team culture. If so, acknowledge that. Tell them you will schedule time with them individually, and make it clear that what they talk about is their choice completely. Appreciate them in advance for taking their time to help you.

Given the freedom and encouragement to do so--and if they feel safe enough--people will usually talk about what is important to them. People generally feel safer when they have choices, know the purpose, know how the information they give will be used, and know that there are no right or wrong answers to your questions.

Listen and Watch for Patterns
The usual project dashboard kinds of questions won't work. Those are questions about "things." To find the energy, you need to ask "energy" questions. When you meet with each person, ask what he or she enjoys about working on the project, and then move on to a question like, "What do you think is working well on this project?", perhaps followed by, "What concerns you most about this project?" Reserve some time at the end for questions like, "What else would you like me to know?" and "What would you like to ask me?"

Listen carefully to their words and their voice, and watch their body language, including their breathing. Pay attention to what is said, and to what is not said. From all this, you may get clues about where to go next with further questions. The worst thing you can do is try to explain to the person why they are wrong or misinformed. At this point, try to keep an open communication channel. Judging their answer is a sure way to close the channel.

As you talk with more team members, you may start to notice energy patterns. By energy patterns, I mean a significant number of individuals freely commenting on (or avoiding) the same issue without solicitation. Here are a few examples of energy patterns I detected in a recent project review:

• Decisions do not seem to stick on this project.
  
• Many people seem concerned about knowledge transfer because the external implementation partner is leaving soon and the partner's employees have done most of the technical work.
  
• No one is talking about the transition from development to production operations. There is currently no production organization set up to accept this application.
  

Finding the energy patterns in your project team can help you locate and remove the sharp sticks in your project's eye.