From time to time every leader has to deal with people on his or her team that are not performing up to expectations. Someone is dropping the ball and forgetting to do things. Someone is not getting tasks done on time. Someone’s work is not up to standard. It could be a number of things. Then you’ve got to have one of those difficult conversations bringing the issue to their attention, trying to find out what the underlying problem is, and then making changes so performance improves.
But what if the person under performing is you?
What if you are the one who is keeping your team from meeting its goals?
That’s the situation I find myself in now.
As my company, OurChurch.Com, has grown, we’ve added staff to do member support, sales, graphic design, web design, and search engine optimization. But I still wear two hats, that of CEO and primary software developer. As we’ve grown as a company, both of those roles have continued to grow.
As CEO, I do weekly meetings with each of our senior staff. As we’ve added staff, I’ve added meetings. Several years ago I began leading semi-annual strategic planning meetings (and implementing those plans). Three plus years ago I started writing the Christian Web Trends blog. Last year I began doing weekly marketing meetings and exhibiting and speaking at conferences.
As my CEO responsibilities have grown, they’ve squeezed more and more time away from development. Deadlines have been missed. Projects have sat on my to do list for months. When we would gather as a team for those strategic planning meetings and assess our progress, it was obvious I was not getting my stuff done. It’s been frustrating and embarrassing.
How can I hold the other members of my team accountable, when I am missing more deadlines than I’m making?
So, what do you do when you’re the person hindering your team?
Here’s what I think:
- Admit it to yourself. You know there’s a problem. Your team is not meeting its goals. The longer you live in denial about what the primary problem is, the longer the problem will continue to plague your team. It’s time to be honest with yourself.
- Humbly take responsibility for your failings. Chances are other people on the team have already known you’ve been holding things up but didn’t want to say anything. Blaming others, not saying anything, or creating a double standard for yourself will destroy your team’s trust in you.
- Develop a plan. Some possible solutions might include restructuring your schedule to put more time or more of your most productive time into the area that needs it, delegating to/training another staff member on some of your responsibilities, or hiring someone who can do the work better than you can.
- Stick to the plan. Restructuring your schedule, training others, and hiring all take time and effort. The challenge with implementing the plan is that it will initially call for even more from you at a time when you feel like you have the least to give. Find a way to do it. If you don’t, in 6 months you’ll find yourself in exactly the same situation, except you and your team will be even more frustrated.
I’m in the process of doing this now. We’ve hired a new software developer to take most of the development work off my plate. She starts Tuesday. It took a lot of time to review resumes and conduct interviews. It will take even more time to get her up to speed on our development projects. But I am making the time because it’s the only way to move forward.
Have you ever felt like you were the biggest impediment to your team meeting its goals? How did you handle it?
[image by eqqman]