Welcome to “Driving Businesses by Developing People” written by me, David Huynh. For those who do not know me, I am a people-focused business professional who builds team members to generate results. Thank you for joining me. If you are not on my email list yet and want to dive deeper into the intersection of business and people with me, you may subscribe here:
Last week, we opened our three part series on tailoring our approach with each team member on speaking with each team member differently. Today, we will cover the second component of tailoring our approach, spending varying amounts of time with each team member, and continue to drive the underlying thesis that a tailored treatment of team members will lead to greater team and individual success.
As any business professional, the biggest decision we need to make is how to spend our time. When I was a business consultant, I needed to decide my activities for the day, e.g., if I should spend the day forecasting the client's sales or interviewing experts in the field. As a manager, I needed to decide how much time I invest with each team member, which is a function of two comparisons 1) team member ability vs. task difficulty and 2) importance vs. urgency.
Understand Team Skill vs. Task Difficulty
As a manager, before we can assess how much time we need to spend with each team member, we need to understand each team member's ability, specifically, in relation to their task(s) difficulty. We can determine a team member's ability by gauging their past planned approaches and deliverables. To test for ability while limiting business risk, we can define intermediary check-in points.
Concurrently, we need to understand task difficulty by understanding potential paths to the solution. By having potential approaches in mind, we should get a sense for the level of difficulty of the problem and compare against our assessment of our team member's ability. We should do this comparison of ability and task difficulty individually for each team member.
Urgency vs. Importance
After we have assessed their ability against the task difficulty, we can begin to look at the next comparison point: urgency vs. importance. Urgency refers to the proximity to the deadline, whereas importance refers to the impact of the task. To illustrate this concept, let's say we paid for a team lunch today on December 10th and need to expense this to the company. The last day to submit expenses is the 15th of each month. Concurrently, the company CEO wants a report on last month's results by December 18th. Our assessment of importance depends on our personal values. For example, if we value the CEO's opinion of us more than the value of the lunch bill, last month's report is more important. Conversely, if we are short on cash and need money to buy presents, doing company expenses is more important. Urgency on the other hand is a function of the deadline. In this case, if we want to submit the expenses by the 15th of December, it is more urgent. However, if we are aiming to submit the expenses by the 15th of January, last month's report will be more urgent.
Now that we have defined urgency and importance, let us tie this with our comparison of task difficulty and team skill by expanding on two cases. First, we will review the case where task difficulty is equal or lower than team skill. Next we will review the complementary case, when task difficulty is higher than team skill. The following diagrams will show the suggested action based on the level of urgency and importance for both of the aforementioned cases.
In the case when the task is easy, relative to team skill, we should only consider two possibilities - delegating and delaying. If urgency and important are both low, we should delay the task until it becomes urgent or important. In all other cases, we should delegate the task, meaning hand over full decision making and handling to the team member. If task difficulty is similar to team skill and we want to make sure the team is headed on the right path, we could ask our team to align on the end goal and their planned approach before setting them loose. Overall, if task difficulty is low relative to the team's skill level, our level of involvement should be low.
In the second case, when task difficulty is higher than team skill, we will need to increase our involvement. Then, based on the task's urgency and importance, we will need to tailor how we are involved. Let us drilling deeper into each quadrant.
Do (High Urgency, High Importance)
For tasks that are highly urgent and highly important, we will need to be directly involved, whether by doing the work ourselves or working through the problem alongside our team.
Develop (Low Urgency, High Importance)
If we have the privilege of our important tasks being not urgent, we can invest our time in training and developing our team members, such that their skill level rises above the task difficulty. We should define low urgency as tasks that our team has enough time to make iterations. Once we are able to train our team, we can refer to the first (blue) diagram and delegate the task with limited involvement. The way that we can train can vary, I have found existing frameworks (e.g., tell, show, try) then supplemented with continued feedback to be effective.
Direct (High Urgency, Low Importance)
In the event that the task is highly urgent, but not important, we can get involved by providing clear instructions and directing our team.
Delay (Low Urgency, Low Importance)
Similar to the case where the task difficulty is equal or lower than team skill, for low urgency and low importance tasks, we should not spend mental energy on these tasks with our team.
Closing Remarks
By tailoring the amount of time and how we spend that time with each team member, we can uplift the overall level of performance of the entire team. Each team member is different and we need to look to understand their abilities as they pertain to their objectives. For individuals who have a full grasp of their work, we can delegate work accordingly for them to solve problems. In all other cases, our involvement should be based on the importance and urgency of the objective at hand. If highly important and urgent, we can spend our time in a more hands-on or co-working manner. Conversely, for non-important and non-urgent tasks, we should delay them until they are urgent or important. For all other cases, we can serve as a guide to our team members by directing or developing them to solve problems.
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