As a leader, how to avoid the pain of your overloaded Calendar?

Are you as a leader -no matter if you are a manager of a team or a project manager- complaining about lack of time and that your calendar is always loaded with meetings which are usually going over time?

Do you want a solution?

The answer is simple and in one word…Clustering.

The definition of clustering is ‘’a number of things of the same kind, growing or held together; as a bunch.’’ So, how to apply this technique when leading a team in a project or generally as a manager within your department?

If you are a manager, your goal should be two things:

1- To break down the big overwhelming goals of the team into small manageable ones, and then cluster similar or related actions together, and assign those actions to the right team member according to his/her skill set.

2- As soon as you make your expectations clear and clarify to your team what’s the end target, the timelines...etc., you wait for their commitment to reach this goal within this timeline, and then you step out of the way and let them use their creativity to achieve their goals.

From this point onward, your role should shift from ''managing the team'' to ''advising and serving the team''.  

You are not supposed to appear in the picture, keep attending operational meetings, or even to keep asking your employees each day about the updates. Furthermore, you are not supposed to check their action plans and walk through these plans step by step.

Same scenario if you are a Project Manager. You cluster the actions and tasks per functional area, distribute them to the right team members, and ask each team member to ''own'' the clustered actions related to his or her functional area.

As an example, all clustered actions related to an Engineering functional area are to be run by your team member from Engineering. But are all Engineering action items supposed to be held by one Engineer only?

No. Your team member is just the interface to you and the other project team members. He or she takes care of all extended Engineering team members within the organization, as well as the people he needs to interact with to get those actions done, and then he reports to you the very simplified summary.

Be aware that depending on how big your project or your organization, you may need two or more team members to be responsible for the clustered actions of a specific functional area.

One thing to keep in consideration is that the clustering technique works efficiently only in two conditions:

1- When each team member has the complete freedom to create his or her action plan (as long as it fits the overall time plan), and to meet and team up with other people and stakeholders from different teams and departments that he believes that they can help him reach his goals.

2- And when the team members feel that they are protected and that their leader is standing behind them. In other words, when they feel real freedom to make mistakes without pointing fingers or attacking them.

In fact, the real role of a leader here should be to encourage the team member who is facing a problem or feeling blocked to raise his hand as early as possible so that the leader and the other team members can help him.

Unfortunately, this mindset is not implemented in a lot of organizations, and as soon as a problem occurs you find people pointing fingers at each other to find someone ‘’responsible’’ for the mistake or the failure.

This approach will eventually lead to fear. Fear of doing creative work, or fear to make commitments from team members.

Now, what should happen after you cluster the actions and assign them to the right people?

Should you wait for each team member beside his desk and follow up with him or her to convey urgency and to ensure that everything is moving according to the timeline?

Or should you invite your team to several meetings each week and get into in-depth details?

The answer is ‘’No’’ for both questions.

You send an invitation for only one review meeting per week for around half an hour (in urgent cases and, if needed, two times per week).

In your review meetings, you should ask only two questions to each team member:

1- Are we on track? Yes or no question.

2- If no, then why? And how can I serve you and remove obstacles from your way?

Sometimes it may happen that a team member will need to explain in detail something to another team member. In this case, you should ask both members to have a separate discussion or a meeting alone (without you or other team members). This will give the message to all your team members that you respect their time by not bothering them with details that they are not interested in.

In this way, you will not only help them reach their targets while being creative themselves, but you will also show them how a real leader can serve, and which actions he can take to help his team. And respectively, this will impact their careers later when they become in managerial roles themselves.

On top of that, you will ensure that your meetings will finish on time, which will give them a great example of time management.

And finally, your team will be willing to attend those review meetings because they are short and to the point, and because you are there not to micromanage them, but instead to serve them.

So, if you are complaining that you are spending a lot of time on meetings or that your team is not effective enough, or not committing to their action plans or that you are wasting a lot of time because you have to do everything ‘’by yourself’’, then this means that you are trying to interfere in every topic in order to ensure that is done correctly. And this respectively conveys that you do not trust your team members, and that’s why accountability and commitment are missing.

Cluster your items. Assign them to the right team member. Make him or her truly feel that you are there to help and serve, and do not dig into too many details. And finally, do not blame him if things went wrong, and you will get the best out of your team.