A short exclusive article, originally published in The Executive Summary in January 2020 - now here for your long-term benefit!
Who has sat in a team meeting doing a quarterly goal session before? And everyone nods in agreement about the deadlines that get pulled out of thin air, some tasks broken into tiny detail and others vague as the ingredients on KFCs secret 11 list.
You sneak out wondering how on earth it will pull together, and kind of admitting quietly that it probably won't for at least another 2 quarters.
Its nobody’s fault... managers spend a lot of their day looking at new ways to grow business, maintaining relationships with everyone up and down and across from them. They might do a "nownagain" check-up but even then, a team member often says things are on track because they have no idea how to unravel the big task into chunks and want to save face in the board room.
Here are 5 things you can try to help keep projects moving towards the finish-line.
1. Managers chat one on one with the people involved, don’t wait for group meetings. This way it will become obvious if one person is the holdup, if one area of the project is going to take more time or resource than expected, and also help people brave up with their challenges when you do meet as a team.
2. Team members, if something is looking too big and scary, it probably hasn't been sufficiently chunked down. Start making a list of all the sub-tasks you would need to do to get to each task, then make sure they are in order to the best of your ability. Circle the areas you can do alone/with current resources, then you can show your manager the outstanding tasks and ask for help with those.
3. All create reminders for the middle of the workweek, to update the team with your progress and challenges. Maybe buddy up so you only have to tell one person, not the entire team, or that can mean too much pinging in inboxes.
4. Make sure the goal is truly specific and measurable. "Grow brand awareness by 20%" is not a goal if you don't know how aware people currently are, and c’mon, brand awareness is ambiguous. "Set up a way to ask all incoming leads where they heard about us and why they chose us, and keep A/B testing our campaigns until 20% of all responses are along the lines of 'referral' or 'needed an x and your name popped up first'" might be more tangible. There are obvious tasks and sub-tasks that can be broken down from that.
5. Project management tools only work as well as the people who remember to use and update and check them. Sometimes that is only the project manager. So, using a human who is emotionally detached from the project can go a long way, like having a personal fitness coach. You are forced to face your roadblocks head-on and brainstorm through them, and you don't have to rely on software or busy brains to keep things moving.
Success gurus are constantly telling us that "what you track and measure, grows". This is how a fitness watch works - it gives you data to work with - just a few more steps to the goal! Good intentions that don’t get tracked will get dusty in a corner pretty quickly. Having someone dedicated to following up and reminding team members means that staff can focus on their daily duties and firefighting without the project falling behind.
Outsourcing the small things doesn't just mean you get to focus on the actual tasks instead of the "paperwork"; people are more likely to keep their commitments, as it is much harder to make excuses to somebody outside of the company. If this sounds like something you need - we’d love to help!
