In the prologue of the book, Leadership Is About People, I ask the reader six questions. The six questions are listed below.
Questions
- What does it mean to be a successful team leader?
- How much should I be leading people versus doing “real work”?
- When I start a new project, what should I do first? Why?
- How can I tell whether my project is in trouble?
- How do I lead my project back out of trouble?
- How do I make a plan? How detailed does it need to be?
My suggestion is to write down your answers both before and after you’ve read the book. Then compare your two sets of responses to prove to yourself that you learned something by reading the book.
In case you are interested, here are my answers to the set of six questions.
Questions with Answers
1. What does it mean to be a successful team leader?
Your job is to make your team successful. That means that your job is to bring out your people’s best work while helping them to achieve their goal as a team.
2. How much should I be leading people versus doing “real work”?
The multiplier effect means that a good leader should almost always be leading rather than doing direct work. One notable exception is when a leader takes on a direct work task in order to better understand what challenges the people on their team are facing.
3. When I start a new project, what should I do first? Why?
Make a project plan then use it to find the critical path/chain. Your team should always be working on the current critical path task. They should be doing this because the critical path determines the earliest possible date your project may finish. While the team is working on critical path and other tasks, you – the leader – should be checking your plan and looking ahead so you can avoid or remove obstacles.
4. How can I tell whether my project is in trouble?
Make a good plan. Then use your plan to compute critical path schedule margin (a.k.a. schedule buffer). Track your project‘s schedule margin over time. When your schedule margin is negative you may be in trouble. When the size of that negative margin exceeds about 20% of the time remaining until the project target date, your project is almost certainly in trouble.
5. How do I lead my project back out of trouble?
Focus on recovering schedule margin on the project critical path/chain. Communicate your situation promptly and honestly. Avoid blame. Be realistic. Seek help anywhere and everywhere. Engage all project stakeholders – especially your team – in the effort to recover schedule margin. Keep your team focused and engaged by sharing the truth with them, asking for their help, listening to their ideas, and creating an atmosphere of urgent execution. Tempo meetings are one good way to do this; the Tempo meeting is described in Chapter 5.
6. How do I make a plan? How detailed does it need to be?
Chapter 5 describes a planning approach based on climbing a mountain. Use this approach to produce a project plan that you can use to manage your project team. The plan will have enough details to understand the tasks that need to be done to complete the project.
