Taking your live to the next level: We’ve all heard the phrase “Live it up!” in regards to a particular event or party. But what I am suggesting here is to LIVE UP — take your life to your next higher self or level. Gracefully clear away anything or one that is slowing you down.
I recently had a conversation with an acquaintance.
She was complaining that her volunteers were not doing all the things she wanted them to do. She was pleading, demanding, consoling, sweet-talking them to get them to do these things. Then she complained, “But I built this structure with very simple parameters. If folks can’t keep their own schedules and see the value, that’s their problem, don’t you agree?”
“I certainly agree. But why are you making it your problem? Why continue to prompt and micro-manage folks, if (as you say) they don’t see the value and can’t keep their own schedules? From a project management and law of attraction perspective, that type of partnership will always be an upstream battle. So – just maybe they aren’t the type of people you want to create with.”
Live UP: In this example, you may want to consider “high firing” (a term from the book The Corporate Mystic by Gay Hendericks and Kate Ludeman). These are good people. They believe in the cause. They are willing to donate their time and intellectual property to your organization. But, they are not totally aligned with what you really want. If they were, you would not be frustrated. There will be no resistance or gap between want they are willing to provide and what you need from them. So, sometimes you have to release the ‘good’ to reach for the ‘even better’. Holding onto the ‘good’ actually slows you down.
On the other hand – there are ways to allow everyone to contribute at the level they are comfortable without slowing or annoying anyone else, AND still get everything that you want out of the relationships easily (by learning some simple project management techniques).
The Corporate Exit Strategies for Blooming Entrepreneurs series details these techniques. Contact [email protected] for more information on those series.
That is a great solution. Often times the people that are not performing are merely not assigned to the right task. Low performance is normally a symptom of mis-matched talent and skills. Breaking down the tasks a little more and allowing the team some autonomy to assign/select the items that they are passionate and masters on — will help. Breaking down the tasks a little more can decouple the feature set, allowing people to see the diamond in the rough (so to speak).
There’s lots of solutions to this … and yours is a great one.
It may not always be possible to ‘high-fire’ someone. In fact, it is rarely the case that a PM has the power to change out team members in the middle of a project. What would you suggest in this case? What about working with the ‘problem’ team member(s) to come up with a better approach that they can follow. Involve them. They to buy-in.