Much as I am loath to admit it, sometimes you need to revert to task based management. Let me explain why.

• The past few weeks have been difficult.
• As we get closer to the end of the year and we need to hit certain deadlines, the pressure mounts for my team and I.
• Recently it has become increasingly evident that some of my young leaders are struggling, and I find myself debating if I made some bad hires this year.
• I will talk about that in a separate episode soon, but for today I want to focus on the following: how do you keep someone on track who is clearly struggling?
• Although I hate to admit it, in this case you really need to micro-manage the person via task-management, by assigning them specific short-term tasks and monitoring the outcomes daily.
• I normally advocate against micro-management, instead I prefer to hire people I can delegate to and let them figure out the required tasks themselves.
• But recently I have a couple of people in my team who can’t, so sadly I have had to step in and assign tasks myself.
• Even if you consider yourself a strategic leader, you will have to get tactical in such situations and hope you remained close enough to the project in question to understand what tasks have the highest priority and need to be executed next.
• Here is how I do it:
  1. On Monday I assign the tasks required this week, based on priorities.
  2. Each day I request a Red/Amber/Green (or “RAG”) status report, a basic one-page summary covering all tasks this week.
  3. I then press the team to get everything green by Friday, and start again the following week.
• Let me once again emphasize that I do NOT endorse this approach in general, and it should only be used when a team or individual is overwhelmed and needs someone else to intervene to get them back on track by focusing on short-term tasks.
• It is a remedial step when something has already gone wrong, and once the team or individual is back on track, you should be able to step away again.
• Maybe the team members in question are genuinely overloaded with tasks, or they are operating at a level they are simply not ready for yet.
• Regardless, you can no longer trust them to operate on their own, and you must set direction and monitor outcomes more closely than you should normally have too.
• My litmus test is a daily stand-up: at my leadership level I should not have to attend a daily stand-up meeting anymore. If I find myself being pulled into them because of an escalation, I know something has gone badly wrong.
• If I then find myself DIRECTING the daily stand-up, it is far worse than I expected, and it causes me to lose fate in those leaders that were supposed to be running the stand-up before me.
• As a leader, my trust comes with strings attached: I am trusting my guys to get the job done.
• If they are not getting the job done, and I need to step in and do it from them, then they will not be my guys for much longer.
• But that will be the topic for a future episode.
• For now, keep them on task and monitor daily, and hope you can step back once the situation stabilizes as this approach is not sustainable for you long-term, in fact it will become exhausting.
• Put simply if you get lost in the tactical details with a struggling team, you will lose sight of the strategic milestones.
• Talk to you next time.

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

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