While the title of this post may not be familiar to you, here’s a saying that you might be more familiar with: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. In other words, you can show the horse where the water is, but the horse has to make the decision to drink or not. This saying applies to almost any workplace, as it is a basic tenet of communication. There are multiple leadership styles out there, but no matter what style you employ, if you want to get your team to do something right you need to convince them it’s the right thing to do. “Right” is highlighted there because someone can perform a task even if they don’t’ agree with it, but you most likely won’t get their best effort. This is also the point that Glenn Ray makes in his entertaining parable below. My thoughts are immediately following the article in the My Comments section.

Read the rest of this entry »

Time estimation and Pricing - These are two of the most important skills that you can develop if you are looking to advance in almost any industry. It’s been my experience that it’s not until you reach a managers level that you encounter the pricing portion of this combination. Also, while you do learn time estimation earlier in your career, it’s usually only estimating your own time as opposed to co-workers you would be in charge of. With that being said, it’s never too early to try and read up on these skills. It’s a tough transition from being held accountable only for your own results to being responsible for an entire team, but it’s the two skills that I mentioned above that are crucial to mastering this transition.

In the article below, Bill Lee makes some interesting points as far as where the responsibility in pricing lies (between team members or the manger of the team). I think this article can be expanded to include time estimation of your team as well. You can find my comments in the My Comments section immediately following the end of the article before the Author Resource Box.

Read the rest of this entry »

As you climb higher and higher on that precarious corporate ladder, you’ll eventually get to the point where you are depending on other people to get work done for a deadline you are responsible for. An example of this would be if you are leading a team doing software design, and you are responsible of having all of the designs done by a certain date. You are responsible for the end result (all of the designs done), but you need your team to actually write the designs for this to happen. What happens if your team doesn’t make the deadline? Who gets the blame? This is a simple answer: You.

With this idea firmly in mind, how do you prevent missing a deadline? This is another simple answer, and yet many people don’t follow it: Be proactive. What does this mean? Well, I find that a good amount of the time a deadline is missed because the team lead does not check to see if their team is on track until the last minute. Finding out that three designs aren’t going to be done the day before the deadline is due is not going to do you any good, as it is too late to do anything about it. However, if in this same situation you were to check a week or two before the deadline was due, the outcome might be different. This is being proactive. For our purposes, we can define it as taking action with enough time before your deadline is due to correct any problems.

The following are three things that you can do to be proactive on your projects as a team lead:

• Have regular meetings - Not just every once and awhile on the fly, but scheduled meetings. This means that your team knows that you have a meeting at a certain time on a certain day every week. For instance, you could have a 10:00 AM meeting every Monday to kick off the week and make sure everybody knows what they should be working on. Also, you could have a meeting at 3:00 PM on Friday to wrap up the week. You don’t have to go overboard and have a meeting everyday (unless you’re in really deep trouble), but I’ve found once or twice a week to be effective. Make sure that you have a structure to the meeting as well, and it’s not just everybody standing around randomly talking. You need to conduct it and have a clear agenda when you go in for what you want to get out of it.

• Keep a tracking spreadsheet - This is another important organization tool: The tracking spreadsheet. Yes, it is a pain to maintain. However, it will save you from a lot of problems in the future. With this spreadsheet, you can see your team’s progress at a glance. This makes it easy to go into a meeting with them and ask questions about who is slipping or who is going to be ahead of schedule and why. This can save your deadlines by allowing people who are ahead of schedule to help pick up the slack of those who are falling behind. Also, this is good for meetings with your boss so that you can give them an easy to understand overview of how your team is progressing. The key point to remember here is to make sure your tracking spreadsheet is up to date. It does you no good if you have one, and yet nobody has updated it for a week. If your team is responsible for updating, remind them to update at the end of everyday (or whatever works for you, I just find the end of the day to be effective). If you are responsible for updating it, make sure you set aside a certain amount of time to do it everyday.

• Check in individually - Even if you have regular meetings, you should have informal progress checks with each of your team members. This doesn’t mean that you have a schedule a specific time for this, this can be as simple as stopping by their cube and asking them how they are doing. This way you don’t have to find out about a problem that happened on Tuesday at your regular Friday meeting. By performing these progress checks, you relay a message to your team that you are right there with them in the trenches, and that you are there to help if they have any questions. Also, as stated above, this allows you to take action immediately on a problem instead of having someone waste their time working on it for days at a time. Linking to the point above, if you find a change in someone’s progress as you talk to them, update the tracking spreadsheet immediately after you get back to your desk. This way you can see how that change is going to impact the rest of the team and your final deadline.

These are just three ways I’ve found that help me to be Proactive. There are probably lots of other ways specific to your work situation that can also help you out. A good way to think about your deadline situation is this: Whoever is holding you responsible for your deadline probably looks at your project as something of a black box. They don’t want to know the fine details, they just know what they want to see come out of it. With this in mind, you want to deal with any problems that arise inside that box, rather than outside of it, so that when your finished product comes out the end result is what this person is looking for.

Meetings are something that most of us engage in everyday at the workplace.  They could range from an informal chat at a cubicle to a scheduled event in a conference room.  This series of articles will provide tips more geared toward the latter type of meeting, what I call the “Formal” meeting.  A few examples of this type of meeting could be a weekly status team meeting, or possibly a review meeting with your clients.  You’ve most likely experienced this type of meeting before, but the question is:  How did you handle it? 

Let’s get down to the tips.

Here is a quick checklist to run through before you enter your meeting:

• Did you print out all of the meeting materials?  This is important, as you can’t rely on the meeting organizer to always print out copies or even have enough copies of the materials. 

• Did you skim the meeting materials?  This goes hand in hand with the first bullet, before a meeting you should take a look at the materials to see what exactly is going to be discussed. This way you can do any necessary research before the meeting on possible questions you want to ask, as well as identify any possible problems that you can head off before the meeting.  If you don’t have time to take a look at all the materials, at least look at the agenda so you have at least a skeleton of an idea of what is going to be discussed.

• Do you have all the necessary contact information?  This is crucial, as a lot of meetings now are “teleconferences” (telecon’s is a common term for them) where you either dial into a meeting system to join or start a meeting (an example would be Meeting Place).  Making sure this information is on hand before time will ensure that the meeting starts on time.  In my experience it is extremely annoying to be stuck waiting for a meeting to start, listening to elevator music.

• Do you have a speaker phone reserved?  This really applies to teleconferences, but if you are holding one or joining one, you should make sure that you have one ready and reserved for you meeting.  At my office, these things fly off the shelf like they were made of gold, so I always reserve well ahead of time.

• Do you have a room reserved?  This may sound, but you would be surprised how many times you schedule a teleconference, a couple of people get together to dial in, and they discover they have no room.  It’s very distracting to hold a teleconference around your co-workers, so I wouldn’t suggest holding it at your cube.  Get a small room if need be, it’s more private and less prone to background noise getting in the way.

• Do you have a pad of paper and a pen?  This is important, as you never know what is going to come out at a meeting.  You should ALWAYS bring something to write on and something to write with to your meetings.  Otherwise, that tidbit of important information you heard will end up going in one ear and out of the other.

• Do you know where the meeting is?  This is especially true if you are a new hire at your company and may not be familiar with the layout of your office yet.  If the meeting is being held in a conference room that you don’t know the location of, ask beforehand where it is.  This will save you the embarrassment of not only walking into the meeting late, but in the middle of the presentation.

Now that you are ready, it’s time to enter the meeting. Check back for Part II of this series, where I will discuss the finer points of actually attending the meeting.

Update: Continue on to Part II of this series here: Surviving a Formal Meeting - Part II.