Your project has a goal, and you lead the team that will achieve that goal.
Is your team’s time valuable? Yes, for at least two reasons:
- The goal is achieved by the team, so your team’s time is as valuable as the goal.
- Your team contains people, who are to be respected, because decency.
According to #1, leaders should maximize the productivity of their team, where productivity is defined as real progress to the goal. According to the Harvard Business Review and the combination of #1 and #2 above, productivity will be higher on teams that are treated like valuable human beings.
Measuring something real progress
What is real progress? In Leadership Is About People we describe many concepts and tools for managing projects, measuring what counts. Start at the end (the goal), and work backward with the necessary steps to achieve the goal. If done right (it will be wrong, but that’s another topic…), you have a plan that allows you to measure progress on work that directly contributes to the goal.
Measuring progress only on tasks that are necessary to complete the goal is the best you can do!
If your metrics can’t be described as measuring real progress to the goal, then you are succumbing to the illusion of progress.
Busywork
Does working late achieve real progress? Does working through lunch achieve real progress? Does my purse contain a carrot?
The answer to all three questions: Possibly, but not necessarily by any stretch of the imagination.
Have you been in a work environment that implicitly rewarded long hours, while not explicitly rewarding real progress to the goal? If your team is doing something that can’t be described as bringing the team closer to the goal, then it’s busywork, and not worth your team’s valuable time.
Think of all the categories of unnecessary busywork, and be creative. Expense reports that take as long to produce as the trips they describe? Filling out timecards? While the accounting and cost control merits of corporate expense reporting and time recording are significant, does your team need to do them? Can somebody else do these things for them, and let them focus on achieving the goal?
Maybe there’s one more notorious time waster in particular that comes to mind…
Meetings
Communication is extremely valuable. You communicate to your team using your plan, which sets team priorities. This is how you lead. Meetings can be very effective ways to keep focus, re-focus, and generally align your team with achieving the goal.
So… what about all those other meetings that suck so much? Busywork. Stop. Just, stop.
If your meeting is wasting your team’s time, then you do not value their time.
If you don’t value your team’s time, then you don’t think the goal is worth much.
So much more to talk about
Just in this short post we’ve uncovered many topics for further discussion:
- Treating people like people
- Making a good plan
- Why it’s OK that your plan is wrong, because it is
- Avoiding the illusion of progress
- Removing all barriers for your team
- Effective meetings!