Is a significant portion of your day spent helping the team decide their path forward on minor scope decisions that impact this week, or this month? Is a thought out, documented path forward presented to help you with your decision making, or are you expected to provide the logic for each and every decision?
This article is focused on the tactical, fork-in-the-road, decisions that must be made every day to ensure project team progress. A fully engaged team, that is well versed in the vision, mission, and values of your organization, will understand the intent of their work and be passionately motivated to solve problems.
Congratulations, your team has the deeper meaning; the “WHY” you offer your service to your customers. The team always needs some more “HOW”.
For you, it’s much more efficient when you’re able to simply click “approve” in Sharepoint, respond to an email with final approval, or sign completed change requests.
When the team becomes capable of making their own determination over their daily direction, they will have a higher feeling of purpose and satisfaction. Young, up-and-coming leaders are especially inspired and motivated with the increase in responsibility over the team.
Some tangible actions you can take to improve your team’s self-direction:
Share the contract and work scope documentation with the team and talk through major points. Allow them to peruse the documentation and come to you with questions regarding specific decisions you have made. It may take a little time before they become comfortable with the language in these documents, ensure to coach them through this.
If available, plan a session to include a legal team member or commercial manager so there can be discussion with them about scenarios and impacts of decisions. The reason behind certain contractual clauses can certainly be eye opening for the leaders of your teams.
Ask one of your team leaders to summarize the expenses categories that are likely across for the project team when traveling, purchasing, and otherwise serving the customer during execution. Review the summarized and categorized expenses with the team and discuss the decision-making process.
Determine the employee/s that always seems to come back with a product that is far better than you ever imagined it. Showcase their deliverables, inspire the team, and let them be a change agent among their peers.
Ensure the team understands the cost structure and have a high-level understanding of the billing/invoicing activities that take place on a regular cycle. Apart from helping them understand what happens on in the back office, it helps them understand how their actions, and decisions, may impact the organization.
Now, I’m not saying to completely remove the training wheels; always try to remember how you learned to get to a level of confidence with these items. Keep the training wheels on for a while, see how the team responds, and coach them through the errors you find. Over time you will most certainly feel more comfortable with some areas of responsibility being completely delegated down.
This can be a large investment in time so it’s best to not go through this alone. You should also be careful to not be telling them answer for situational problems, it’s about teaching the team how to think critically about such issues.
One thing you’ll notice about the team that is managing scope correctly is the absence of “How do I…?” emails. You might be forgiven for thinking that this team could get out of control, but if done correctly, your shepherding of every aspect of the team’s work scope becomes redundant. Generally, by this stage they know how you think and use the same critical thinking that you once did for these applications.
Ok, so you’re now not needed for day-to-day forward momentum. Do you become redundant or unnecessary? The short answer, NO.
I love seeing a team reach this phase of operation. Once free from the shackles of day to day team operations, the manager can start thinking about strategy and direction for the team, focusing on 12-24 months and further. If you’re anything like me you will be invigorated by this new reality, and your company is too.