Improve Your Project: How to Jump Start Your Team

How to Improve Your Project
Every leader eventually confronts the same question: how do you elevate a project that’s losing momentum or falling short of expectations? When progress stalls, what your team often needs isn’t a wholesale overhaul — it’s a fresh surge of clarity, focus, and energy that reignites purpose and elevates performance.

Improve Your Project By Jump Starting Your Project Team

Even high-performing teams can hit a lull — especially when they’ve been tackling similar challenges in similar ways and getting predictable outcomes. And while your last project may have delivered solid results, that doesn’t guarantee your team is energized for what comes next. Before launching into a new initiative, it’s worth giving your people a strategic boost.

Leverage insights from project postmortems and apply a few targeted leadership moves to re-ignite momentum. With the right reset, you can elevate your next project and propel your team toward sharper thinking, stronger collaboration, and a higher level of performance.

1. Start Small
   Begin by tackling a smaller, contained problem to spark fresh thinking and build quick, confidence-boosting wins. Small victories often unlock new perspectives on larger or recurring challenges, helping teams see possibilities they might have overlooked. Just as important: keep the team intentionally lean. Research consistently shows that project teams perform best when they stay below a certain size — allowing for faster decisions, clearer communication, and greater accountability.
2. Get Divergent Points of View
   Deliberately widen the lens by bringing in people who aren’t part of the core team — cross-functional partners, adjacent experts, or seasoned skeptics who can surface insights your group may miss. Teams that actively explore multiple options from diverse perspectives consistently outperform those trapped in internal assumptions and cognitive biases. Some organizations even deploy a formal red team to pressure-test ideas, challenge entrenched thinking, and strengthen overall buy-in.
3. Allow Brainstorming
   Create space for ideas — even the unconventional ones — so team members feel free to contribute without judgment. Effective brainstorming starts with individual reflection before group discussion, giving people time to think deeply rather than default to the dominant voices in the room. When done well, this process sparks more inventive concepts, builds shared ownership, aligns the team around common goals, and reduces the risk of groupthink that can quietly erode project quality.
4. Remove Barriers
   Once your team lands on a promising solution, actively clear the path for execution. Free them from routine tasks and distractions so their full energy and focus can go toward the challenge at hand. Identify the most critical obstacles to success and develop a concrete plan to eliminate or minimize them — removing friction allows your team to move faster, think sharper, and deliver results with greater impact.

The Bottom Line
Every project — and every project team member — faces moments when energy, engagement, and shared accountability wane. To reinvigorate your team and elevate performance, start with these four practical strategies. They provide a simple yet powerful way to jump-start momentum, foster collaboration, and set your project on a path to greater impact.

If you liked learning about how to improve your project, to learn more about being a successful project leader, download 5 Steps to Align Project Teams to Pull in the Same Direction

Tristam Brown

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.