Sunday 23rd February 2025

Sometimes your team members can get stuck in waiting mode, perhaps for prolonged periods of time if you are not careful.

Topics:

• On a daily basis, I ask my team members for status updates.
• Giving a status update is a specific skill-set: you want to give clear facts as concisely as possible.
• Dates, numbers, dollar amounts...these are clear facts. They are measurable.
• When the person starts to waffle during a status update and go off on tangents, it is a red flag.
• Another red flag is when they begin their status update with "I am waiting on...".
• They may not be blocked right now, but they are stuck in a waiting patterns which is just as bad as may lead to a deadlock.
• Time is being spent, but no progress is being made.
• Rather than waiting, the need to be pushing.
• There is such a thing as positive pushiness, when someone is pro-actively pushing a topic forward rather than passively waiting for the result.
• In a busy commercial environment, especially a start-up: you need to keep moving or die.
• Your competition is not waiting, so why are you?
• A big enterprise is different: it may have "stuck in waiting mode" built into it's DNA, but as a leader you need to challenge that status quo.
• When I receive the "I am waiting on..." status update from someone in my team, I immediately respond with "have you tried X, or Y, or Z?" to try to get them moving again.
• But to be honest that frustrates me, as senior folks will work out those options for themselves, or even better options than anything I can come up with.
• Put simply: "stuck in waiting mode" behaviour is fine for junior folks, or even mid-level folks on some occasions, but for senior folks it is unacceptable and should be called out during 1-to-1 sessions.
• Waiting is fine if you have other tasks you can do in the interim to keep the objective moving forward, but if it becomes blocking, a plan B needs to be identified immediately.
• Waiting is not a good strategy, and if it become endemic in your team, it can become a terrible anti-pattern.
• Don't let waiting become part of your culture.

Download audio

techleaderpro-2025-week-8.mp3

File details: 6 MB MP3, 4 mins 9 secs duration.

Title music is "Apparent Solution" by Brendon Moeller, licensed via www.epidemicsound.com

Subscribe

Apple Podcasts (iTunes)

Spotify

YouTube Music

Amazon Music

YouTube

Main RSS feed

Sponsor

Five.Today is a highly-secure personal productivity application designed to help you to manage your priorities more effectively, by focusing on your five most important tasks you need to achieve each day.

Our goal is to help you to keep track of all your tasks, notes and journals in one beautifully simple place, which is highly secure via end-to-end encryption. Visit the URL Five.Today to sign up for free!