Your team member is lost in a sea of project goals. How can you guide them towards clarity and success?
When a team member is adrift in goals, anchor them with focused guidance. To chart a course to success:
How do you help colleagues hone in on their goals? Share your strategies.
Your team member is lost in a sea of project goals. How can you guide them towards clarity and success?
When a team member is adrift in goals, anchor them with focused guidance. To chart a course to success:
How do you help colleagues hone in on their goals? Share your strategies.
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Call me a dinosaur, but I believe technology has sometimes overcomplicated project management. Online project schedules and Gantt charts can disrupt focus, forcing us to navigate endless files and folders just to find updates. There's something uniquely clear about the old-school Gantt charts stuck on a wall, giving a bird’s-eye view of multiple projects at once. Sometimes, simplicity trumps sophistication when it comes to staying organized and maintaining clarity.
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Define clear, specific, and achievable goals together. Understand what’s missing: skills, resources, or clarity. Provide regular feedback and celebrate progress.
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This does happen often where it becomes overwhelming and in the endeavour to do everything, the hardworking team member forgets prioritising his/ her tasks. It definitely calls for intervention. I would help the member get the work arranged according to priorities. Sometimes, people are shy to ask help. This can be an opportunity to encourage the member to speak out in the team and ask for support. Colleagues do help. After all, it’s the team that has to win!!
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To guide your team member, first identify whether their confusion stems from internal or external issues. Address internal gaps like unclear roles or miscommunication, and mitigate external challenges like resource constraints or stakeholder expectations. Emphasize creating a SMART Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) with tasks that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Shift their focus toward steady progress rather than perfection, ensuring alignment with project goals and milestones. Regularly review progress to reinforce accountability and clarify priorities. Perfection can be refined post-completion; for now, prioritize efficiency and momentum toward delivering the project's core objectives on time.
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Have had many high achieving team members be in this situation before, they know how to achieve goals, by rating them, breaking them down etc but they still found that they were overloading themselves. The goals or projects when rated came back as worth doing. In the end we came up with a rating system where we looked at ‘the impact to the business of not doing’. This helped the team and leadership agree that let’s drop, stop or put on hold a number of initiatives. This helped create a further sense of clarity.
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1. Break down big goals into smaller, manageable tasks. 2. Establish clear priorities using the Eisenhower Matrix. 3. Create a visual roadmap with project management tools and set milestones. 4. Provide regular check-ins, feedback, and celebrate successes. 5. Encourage time management, focus, and a growth mindset.
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This is a common challenge faced by an individual both as team member and as team leader. As a Team Leader/ Manager one can guide this team member by:- 1. Explaining the logical flow of tasks, their interrelationships, priorities, and the sequence within the process. 2. Breaking down tasks into short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals, as well as categorizing them into low, medium, and high-stakes tasks. 3. Providing templates or reference documents from similar tasks to guide their work. 4. Assuring them of their competence while simultaneously monitoring and controlling the process and outcomes to prevent major flaps with deliverables and timelines. Much also depends on the type of leadership model the organization follows.
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First of all we are arranging the one to one meeting to speak about what we established at the beginning of the project and where the process is compatible with other team members( experts). Then we need to find out where the person lost the sense of control over time, workload and confrontation with other people on the team. Then we will create the plan to go back on track and follow the project deadline. A person who is lost sometimes just stuck in some responsibilities and needs to just be supported by the leader to not lose their confidence and perform more productively. We all need somebody to be sure we are on the right path.
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Prioritize and plan together. As a team we need to identify which of the goals should we prioritize and put our focus into that. Empower team members through effective delegation Transparent communication through regular check-ins. Provide and be ready to accept feedback. Support and develop the team through providing right resources and tool and giving recognition for their efforts. Trust your team and address workload challenges/issues
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I lead by example, no one will be lost in a sea of project goals alone. We will all be lost together. 1/ set boundaries, knows when we are at capacity 2/ bring over new members to balance the workload 3/ prioritize key deliverables and work base on timeline set with PM and clients to fullfil the terms agreed on 4/ as a lead, I am the last one to log off, I check on my members as they do not always come to me for help 5/ making them feel and know that their hard work are appreciated 6/ it does not take more than 5 mins to check on someone and ask if there was progress or blockers that you can assist with. (Daily or weekly huddles depending on how tight the deadline is) 7/ let stakeholders know as soon as target date is unachievable
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