The Buck Stops Here!
As a project manager, or any other kind of manager for that matter, this is always the case. You hold responsibility for everything even the shortcomings of your team.
So whenever somebody questions the performance of any member of my team, I feel defensive. That is because I feel that I have been remiss in my role. I have not managed them as well as I should be.
Following the monitoring system that was put in place recently, I can view what my team members are doing on their supposedly working hours. I see some of them not really putting focus on the task at hand.
Then Boss emailed me, asking what the specific tasks of this particular team member are. Good thing, I just had the virtual planning. As an offshoot of that, I asked each one about what needs to be done in terms of their role in the general scheme of things. Their suggestions/recommendations now form part of what else they needed to do aside from their usual tasks.
Had I not thought of that virtual planning, I’d have come up empty handed when Boss asked me. Perhaps, Boss didn’t really mean to check on me as PM, but it always pays to be on top of things.
As a project manager, I feel I need to do the following on a regular basis:
- Check on the performance of my team.
- Find out if they had been doing their tasks, and how.
- Get their feedback regularly. Find out their difficulties, or the challenges they encounter every day.
- Brainstorm with them about the latest web research, web marketing, SEO, web development techniques.
- Make them feel like a stakeholder of the project. That way they own the project, they feel that they own their tasks.
With three projects on hand, I need some superpowers to be effective and efficient on this. After all, the buck always stops here. 