Find someone you believe in who’s ready to take your project on, give them as much control as possible, and push them to do better (while also giving them the tools and resources to do so).
When you can’t do something yourself, there’s no shame in taking the above strategy. You might not have the time, the resources, or the skills to do it… maybe even a combination of those three. What you get done will be done better this way if you’re otherwise handicapped.
Go back to the first statement. Notice the italics. They’re there for a reason.
You need someone you believe in because they’re the ones who are handling what you can’t. You have to be confident in their abilities in order to remove yourself almost entirely from the project and let them do what they do best (while you’re free to do what you do best).
You need to give them as much control as possible because you’re not the one running the show anymore. They are. And they need you out of their hair in order to produce that masterpiece you expect them to produce.
You need to push them to do better because they do, sometimes, need an outside opinion. It also gives you an active role in that project you’re trying to complete. Ryan Holiday calls this The Canvas Strategy. If you haven’t clicked over to that post yet, do it now. (Ryan talks mainly of applying this to “superiors”. But I’d argue that you need to do this for both your “suppliers” and “customers”; “superiority” in project management should be a term reserved only for “final decisions”).
What are you waiting for? You have something that needs to get done, right?
December 22, 2008 at 6:38 am |
There is zero original content in this post. Which means it’s so fundamental that everyone’s already talked about it.
Nevertheless, in everyday life, I see minimal execution of these ideas. And yet they’re so powerful–I have two bigger projects that I’m launching that I barely had the bandwidth for, yet by pulling in others, and seeing how I could add tremendous value to them through these projects, I’m doing exactly this. And cool things are happening.
December 23, 2008 at 3:50 am |
[...] sunset, different mountain In the comments for yesterday’s post, Jeff Widman rightfully pointed out that I wasn’t presenting anything new, groundbreaking, or [...]
December 23, 2008 at 4:15 am |
[...] an entry on my personal blog about how to “get things done”. If you want to read it, click here. If not, the general idea was that you needed to do just one thing to make any project successful: [...]
January 12, 2009 at 9:29 pm |
[...] an entry on my personal blog about how to “get things done”. If you want to read it, click here. If not, the general idea was that you needed to do just one thing to make any project successful: [...]