Coaching and mentoring diagram

Lead Like a Pro: The Case for Personalizing Productivity in the Workplace

I like to optimize, tweak, find ways to improve. My wife hates it when I cook because when she asks me how it turned out I will say something like: “Not bad, but next time I’ll…” No matter how well it turns out I still want it to be a little better next time.

As a project manager (or any leader) you want to coach your team and help them improve. That’s a big part of leading a team. Unfortunately, many leaders try to PIGEON HOLE their team and change the way they work even when it’s not helping.

I think back to an old job. My teammate and I used a web based task manager to plan our day. Despite the fact that we performed well our office manager/co-owner decided THEY preferred to plan their day with pen and paper. So, if that is that worked best for THEM then that is what we must use too.

This really disrupted our day and caused a lot of problems, while bringing no improvements to our workflow.

I want to make a few things clear. We weren’t missing deadlines or under performing. We rarely collaborated directly with this individual, so it wasn’t an effort to consolidate scheduling tools to integrate the team better. This was purely an act of someone who wanted us to work in the manner that was most efficient for them. Never mind if it was what worked for us. It would be like having a basketball coach who was tall and played well in the paint as a player, so all of their players need to play that way even if they are small and more talented as a 3 point shooter.

As a coach you need to help your people find what works best for THEM. There are some exceptions, if it disrupts other workers etc… For example, if a task takes multiple people and one person decides they would rather come in on the weekend to perform it, then they may need to change their schedule to accommodate the rest of the team. But unless something is conflicting with others or company policy/legal matters (such as causing a security concern with important data) then the goal of a leader is to help someone get as close to 100% of their peak performance as possible. To do this, you need to recognize that what works best for you might not work great for them.

A good example of this, I don’t like to be overwhelmed with all the things on my todo list. I figured one of my team members would feel the same way. So I would assign him a single task at a time, and tell him to let me know when it was completed. I assumed he would do it in a timely manner and report back when it was complete, so I could give him his next assignment. This is how I would have wanted it done if I was in his position. Unfortunately he took this to mean that there was nothing else that needed to be done and took it as a license to stretch an hour of work into the entire day.

I would end up feeling like work was piling up and we couldn’t keep up, while he got distracted with personal things. Then he would frustrate me by saying things like “they can’t expect us to hit our billable targets when we have NOTHING to work on!”.

The solution here was to give him the full list of tasks I had for him and not feed them to him one at a time. This gave him a better sense of urgency as he realized there was actually a full day of work lined up for him and he didn’t have free license to scroll social media and complain that we just didn’t have work.

You might have the experience to help give someone some tips to better schedule their day and not miss deadlines. But if your method doesn’t work better for them, then you shouldn’t force them to use that system. Regardless as to how great you think it works for you. This is someone for you to help and advise, but is not a clone of you.

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