Your Guide to Ensure OnTime Delivery
4 key strategies that helped our team get 💩 done
If you’re a TL or project lead, you’re accountable for tasks delivered by your team members.
Have you ever felt the team will miss an important deadline and there’s not much you can do?
How do you ensure the output of your team stays reliable?
When I started facing such problems, my instinct was to jump in and do it myself.
By doing that, I made others feel:
Not respected, as I breached their boundary by taking on their tasks
Micro-managed, by constantly asking updates to avoid end moment slips
Not trusted, as I took all the ownership and others didn’t feel empowered
Inferior, as I expressed my frustration like I could do it better
While none of those were my intentions, I’m sure it didn’t feel good to work with me.
Are you struggling with something similar?
The real challenge in a TL’s life is missing context and accountability. I didn’t know what others were going through when they were unproductive. But I was responsible for making sure the results were on time.
Since then, I made some changes to be more hands off, at the same time ensure timely delivery.
Today, we will explore strategies that can help you become the favorite TL. Both for the team members and the organizational leaders.
This is what we will cover:
🦠 Getting over “I’m better than everyone”
🤝 Building a support system for team members
🗓️ Weekly accountability meetings
🛑 Preset rules for dropping things repeatedly
There’s a lot to cover, let’s begin!
1/4 🦠 Getting over “I’m better than everyone”
A lot of the time the senior person on the team becomes the lead. When I first became TL more than 5 years ago,
I was struggling with feeling productive. I took every opportunity to write code. A lot of the time, at the expense of taking on someone else’s work.
Another mistake was providing direct answers and showing how to do things.
These instincts led me to build a superiority complex. I always jumped in voluntarily when someone was stuck. Because I didn’t want to delay the projects.
I don’t need to spell out how bad of a TL I was. It’s one of my biggest embarrassments to date. Once I recognized this anti-pattern, I went on to understand why I always had the answer. Turns out, I wasn’t smarter than others. I just happened to write the majority of the codebase from the ground up.
You can avoid making the same mistakes. Here’s what I did,
Delegate Ownership: Divided the project into smaller, independent components. Worked with team members to find owners for individual pieces.
Listen, then Guide: My instincts to immediately spit out answers didn’t foster innovation. I changed it by understanding their issues and share my techniques to find the answer.
Create Platform for Visibility: Weekly, our team had leadership updates. I created a rotation for others to be the face of the project. This further enhanced their sense of belongingness and ownership.
By making these changes, I was able to step back and provide the space needed. It significantly improved everyone’s sense of ownership. Also increased the team’s opinion on designs and architectural choices. Win-win!
2/4 🤝 Building a support system for team members
In the fear of missing deadlines, my biggest mistake was always rushing. This prevented me from creating a safe space where people could:
Try out innovative ideas
Discuss alternatives thoroughly
And more importantly, be unproductive from time to time
This resulted in a lack of trust, innovation, and a toxic work environment. I assumed that as a TL, it wasn’t my job to fix. I guess I forgot to be human. One day, I was speaking with one of my friends, and he was complaining about his TL. That was my wake-up call.
I started having weekly 1:1s with all my team members. Checkout 5 Keys to 1:1s to get my template. We’d talk about everything except compensation. This regular chats helped everyone feel,
Part of a team where they’re valued
Mistakes are acceptable, in fact encouraged
It’s okay to occasionally feel unproductive, and deadlines can be pushed
Supported without being judged. We’d have career conversations and strategize for growth.
A TL is responsible for execution but prioritizing people over tasks is the key to any high performing team. Now, I started communicating my good intentions clearly.
3/4 🗓️ Weekly accountability meetings
It’s important to be supportive and empathetic. But one thing the market doesn’t like is unpredictability. Teams are working on building the products with some business goals. In that context, timely delivery is non-negotiable.
As I transitioned from the “not nice” to the “nicest” TL, we experienced,
More things are being dropped on the floor
Frequently timelines needed adjusted
With no one’s fault, productivity was very unstable
All of this affected our deliverables. Delegating ownership worked for better quality but at the cost of longer delivery windows. The balance between support and accountability is hard. We implemented a per-project weekly status meeting with all stakeholders.
These meetings were structured as,
Going over deliverables for each team member for an update
Highlighting any blocker and identifying a stakeholder who can help unblock
Taking meeting notes and sharing with the team and relevant leaders
This was a suggestion from one of my leaders. It’s tied to how the human mind works. Providing updates in a social setting enforces accountability. No one likes to say “no update” for consecutive weeks.
It’s important to look at it from a support perspective. Rather than blaming one for not delivering. The goal was clear, for members it was a platform to show progress and get unblocked. The results of this change were extremely positive.
4/4 🛑 Preset rules for dropping things repeatedly
Personally I’ve experienced many productivity hits that affected my deliverables. Everyone goes through ups and downs. It’s important to be mindful and create space for such downtimes. But it’s also very important to keep the output reasonably stable.
Starting 2021, a lot of us were going through cycles of unproductivity. Now, I didn’t want to blindly do it myself. So there was nothing much I could do. After speaking with some seniors and my manager, we spoke about a few strategies.
I learned that abruptly taking on work was the problem. But as a lead, we need to act as the glue from time to time. This led us to creating a rule within the team,
“If you drop this more than X number of times, someone else will temporarily pick it up”
While the someone else was mostly me, the proactive messaging helped everyone. It didn’t feel unexpected and the team actually appreciated the gesture. It made everyone feel more supported. Everyone helped each other out in challenging times.
🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts
Balancing the team and deliverables is a real challenge for every leader. Between getting 💩 done and being supportive, I struggled a lot before getting it right. The journey was hard and long, but I think each mistake taught me something new. To be completely honest, I still make mistakes and readjust. The 4 strategies I shared today are my constants.
You can apply these into your work and create a more open, supportive work environment. Bonus, you can become the favorite leader everyone wants to work with!
What strategies do you use to maintain timely delivery? Share them in the comments!
🐦🔥This Week’s Favorites
- by
Dealing with Imposter Syndrome from
byData Pipeline choices and trade offs from
byRecognize potential in engineers from
by
👋 💬 Get In Touch
Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.
If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly on akash@chromium.org.
If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.
Thanks for sharing some of your early experience as a team leader. I think that is so helpful to for new leaders to hear that it is hard and you have so much to learn when you take on the role!
[...]In the fear of missing deadlines, my biggest mistake was always[...] rushing
That happened to me 😅