Leading Your Team Towards Progress
Have you ever found yourself at the end of a long project cycle only to realize that you haven’t accomplished nearly as much as you set out to?
So have I.
If you have ever experienced this, it’s likely you fell into the “activity means progress” trap. It’s where everyone is super busy. So busy that we must be making some really great progress. Then you get to the end of the road and wonder how you ended up with so little of the work actually completed.
Don’t feel bad. It happens more often than you think and to more people then you would expect.
Progress can be elusive to your team for a number of reasons. It has many look-a-likes. Activity is one of them. It creates a similar energy as progress because of all of the movement. But it’s not progress.
Another is productivity. Productivity isn’t bad. In fact, it’s extremely useful. When you have a long list of unrelated tasks that need to get done, productivity might just be the thing you want. Unlike activity, when you get to the end of the day you can see all the things you actually completed. But it’s still not progress.
Progress is unique. It has the movement of activity AND the accomplishment of productivity. It has something else as well. Progress includes the sense that we are actually closer to where we want to be. That’s something that activity or productivity alone can rarely provide, if ever.
I define progress like this. Progress is making the right things, the right amount of better, in the right amount of time.
Can you see the difference? Progress carries with it a strategic task towards a strategic objective over a strategic period of time. It’s not enough for it to just be busy or even satisfying as both activity and productivity are. It has to lead somewhere.
So how do you help your teams shake off the less helpful look-a-likes and fully achieve the real thing?
Provide Your Team with Clarity
If your team is extremely active, but you aren’t seeing any real progress it’s likely they lack real clarity about your expectations and the details around the work. In the absence of that clarity they are keeping busy, but without direction.
In order for your team to be strategic about their work they have to understand the details of the work itself. You can’t really make the right things the right amount of better, in the right amount of time when none of those things have been defined.
Here are some specifics that you team would really appreciate knowing.
Who does the work impact?
Clarity about who the stakeholders are in a project is extremely important. It helps your team navigate how this project will be used. It lets them get in the correct frame of mind and approach it from the right angles.
Why is the work important?
This answers the question, “what is the right thing?” It’s less about what the work is and more about how it will impact the customer. When your team has a handle on this it adds a seriousness to their work.
What is the timeframe they will are working with?
What’s the right amount of time? As the famous Parkinson’s Law states, “the work expands to fill the time allotted.” It’s up to you as a leader to help the team place constraints on that time. Progress is ruined when the work takes too long or wasn’t long enough for the challenge.
What are the outcomes you are trying to achieve?
This is perhaps the most important thing to clarify. What is the right amount of better? If you and your team don’t define the target before you take your shot how do you know what to aim for.
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” ~ Lewis Carroll
Improve Collaboration Between You and the Team
You can’t just set the details of a project and then walk away. In order for a team to be great, they have to work together towards shared understanding, and you have to make sure that they have that shared understanding.
This process of measurement requires that your team have a clear collaboration system in place. Whether direct collaboration is daily, weekly, or some other interval will depend on the size and length of the project, but you as the leader need to make that system known and encouraged.
Here are the types of things I want to see or discuss through this collaboration system.
Sharing the plan
Before the work even starts on any single component, I want to encourage a brief, but descriptive, write up of how a team or in individual plans to proceed. This provides clarity on their thought process and gives others a chance to assist with blind spots.
Help tackling a problem
Everyone gets stuck at some point, but not everyone can get out of the weeds when it happens. By encouraging this kind of team feedback you give everyone permission to not have all the answers. And the great things is that just by writing out a problem you are having can sometimes get you unstuck.
Show the work thus far
Nothing aides with moving towards progress like showing off progress. Showing off how the work is progressing helps the entire team celebrate the wins, examine their assumptions, discover disconnect, and see how well they are moving towards the outcomes.
It also has the added advantage of revealing when a team or individual may be stuck and not even be aware of it.
New considerations that have arisen
Most projects have unknown unknowns at the beginning. The sooner you can uncover what those may be, the better for everyone. Talking about all the considerations that arise throughout the project helps to unearth those unknowns and place them squarely in the known category so they can be properly addressed.
While as a leader progress isn’t something you can impact directly, you can provide clarity and improve collaboration. And progress is found at the intersection of clarity and collaboration. Let’s use the tools we have as leaders to help our teams achieve the best possible outcomes.