As you climb higher and higher on that precarious corporate ladder, you'll eventually get to the point where you are depending on other people to get work done for a deadline you are responsible for. An example of this would be if you are leading a team doing software design, and you are responsible of having all of the designs done by a certain date. You are responsible for the end result (all of the designs done), but you need your team to actually write the designs for this to happen. What happens if your team doesn't make the deadline? Who gets the blame? This is a simple answer: You.
With this idea firmly in mind, how do you prevent missing a deadline? This is another simple answer, and yet many people don't follow it: Be proactive. What does this mean? Well, I find that a good amount of the time a deadline is missed because the team lead does not check to see if their team is on track until the last minute.
Finding out that three designs aren't going to be done the day before the deadline is due is not going to do you any good, as it is too late to do anything about it. However, if in this same situation you were to check a week or two before the deadline was due, the outcome might be different. This is being proactive. For our purposes, we can define it as taking action with enough time before your deadline is due to correct any problems.
The following are three things that you can do to be proactive on your projects as a team lead:
- Have regular meetings - Not just every once and awhile on the fly, but scheduled meetings. This means that your team knows that you have a meeting at a certain time on a certain day every week. For instance, you could have a 10:00 AM meeting every Monday to kick off the week and make sure everybody knows what they should be working on. Also, you could have a meeting at 3:00 PM on Friday to wrap up the week.
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