One of the biggest struggles for developing leaders is getting things done. It’s easy to think that productivity comes down to motivation, discipline, or other “x-factors”, but even the most motivated managers struggle to achieve if they don’t feel confident in how they should approach a complex or nuanced project.
Our first steps as professionals are spent learning to be productive when given specific, clear instructions. I spent the first part of my career treating most workdays as a color-by-numbers exercise – following instructions, asking whether I stayed inside the lines, and avoiding any improvisation. There’s no guide available to young professionals teaching them how to break out of this comfortable cycle. This is especially true for knowledge workers. Workers with technical skills have apprenticeship periods, while no such thing exists for managers, facilitators, and other leadership professions.
We must all navigate a gap between being told how to get things done and deciding how to get things done. The uncomfortable truth of professional success is that as we grow, we’re expected to produce larger outputs with fewer inputs. To do this, you need a framework for making progress on projects that are outside of your comfort zone.
Any project you’re working on can be broken down into three component parts: what you are trying to accomplish, what core actions will get you there, and who the right people are to contribute to our efforts. By understanding these elements and how to apply them to the projects you’re working on, you’ll learn how to begin thinking for yourself and be able to establish yourself as a competent, independent leader.
What Are We Trying to Accomplish?
Few people are taught how to decide what to do. Most of us only ever get to work on the small parts of the larger whole, never grasping the why behind our work. This deprives us of the ability to pause and look at the big picture and understand how our actions fit into the larger organizational objectives and vision. So as we start to take on projects of our own, it can be easy to overlook the value of outlining the overarching goal of any new venture.
In any complex organization, one of the biggest hurdles to teamwork is a lack of shared understanding of direction. Every initiative should start with a shared understanding of what it’s trying to impact. Framing this vision and related set of objectives is the most essential step in getting buy-in with a new project. This seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how many large organizations have teams working toward deliverables where the intended impact hasn’t been clearly communicated. Any team that can’t articulate success, and how their work is helping the organization, is guaranteed failure.
The easiest place to start is to consider the large organizational objectives. What are the big initiatives your organization is taking on this year? Increased revenue? Higher customer satisfaction? Launching a new service? For anything that your organization has considered a priority, there’s likely a specific accomplishment tied to that item: we want to grow revenue by 10% this year, we want to improve customer retention, etc.
Whatever it is you’ve decided to work on, start with a simple sentence that outlines the objective in a way that can be shared with others. Focus on what change you’re making to a key organizational attribute. Example: We want to (increase, decrease, expand, grow, deliver, etc.) (revenue, customer satisfaction, units, expenses, service lines, a specific project etc.) by the end of (this month, this quarter, this year, the next twelve weeks, etc.). Consider these accomplishments a succinct version of the SMART method for writing goals.
What Are the Key Milestones?
After understanding what impact you’re trying to have, the next step is to break your initiative down into component part. Stated simply, what needs to get done in order to achieve the desired impact? What are the handful of key achievements that will get you 80% towards your goal?
By breaking your project down into key components, you take your work from intangible to tangible, translating pie-in-the-sky goals to concrete steps, getting you closer to where you want to go.
As an example, if you had a goal to improve customer satisfaction, some of your milestones might look like this:
- Assess products, services, or regions where customers are most dissatisfied
- Put together a customer satisfaction team to take responsibility for customer satisfaction improvement
- Implement a secret shopper program to validate customer experience with our product
Obviously, your mileage may vary, but this should give you an example of how you can start to translate a broad goal (improve customer satisfaction) into actionable steps (implement a secret shopper program). Once you have a list that feels robust enough, you can consider an even more specific set of questions:
- What stakeholders do I need involved to accomplish my list of milestones?
- What financial resources do I need to make progress on my project?
- Do I need permission or other misc. blessings to accomplish any of my milestones?
By taking a few minutes to break your larger objective down into degrees of specificity, you’ll develop a more robust outline for how to approach any objective, especially daunting ones. Be flexible on how many layers down you go with your questions, as it will always depend on the time frame and granularity of your project. Conveniently, this exercise works regardless of how many layers you’re working with. What’s most important is breaking the work into small, manageable pieces until you get to a measure of work that you can tackle confidently.
These digestible milestones also increase your likelihood of getting buy-in and commitment from teammates. No one wants to be tied to “improve customer retention” but most people are perfectly comfortable with “revise company homepage”. Clear, simple milestones decrease friction and increase the likelihood of follow-through by all parties.
Who Should be Involved in This Initiative?
Another sign that you have strong, specific milestones is whether or not you’re able to identify who you need on your team to offer input. No project can make progress without the right people involved. If you could snap your fingers and get guaranteed buy-in, who from your organization would you involve? Who’s going to be your main political obstacle? Who has a super-power that would help get your project off the ground?
The right team makes all the difference, and ensuring that you have the right stakeholders involved is the key difference between a project that fires off like a rocket and one that explodes on the launchpad.
Another essential element to a broad team is a diffusion of responsibility. As much as you may want to champion this entire initiative yourself, you (literally) can’t do everything. No project should make or break solely on your input and initiative. You’re always going to need the input and support of others and those others are going to have to make this a priority. That means you need them to take responsibility and commit to being a part of the project.
In turn, what they need from you is a) clearly defined reason for their participation and b) specific tasks/actions you need their input on. If you can’t answer either of those questions, then you haven’t put enough thought into who should be on your team and/or your project isn’t broken down into discrete enough steps. The better your milestones, the clearer it’ll be who should be involved and where you need help.
Every professional wants autonomy in their work. We want the flexibility to make decisions about how we get things done and to avoid micro-management. However, to achieve this state of independence we have to demonstrate that we know how to do the kind of work that comes with independence – that we have the ability to do great work, even when we don’t have a set of instructions or guidelines that would make us most comfortable. We’re tasked with taking a broad, ill-defined sense of “success” and distilling it into concrete outcomes with clear steps and milestones.
By learning to work outside the restrictive structures that most managers are trained in, we develop a leadership mindset. We learn how to find success in uncertainty, developing the tools needed to be more creative and thoughtful in strategy, planning, and understanding the resources needed to accomplish specific tasks.
Good luck out there.
-Patrick