So my uni course has decided to give us ~~hell~~ a group project, and I’m not having a great time with it. My working style is to keep very on top of things at all times – on it from the word go, getting things done properly and well before the deadline, and I have the grades to show for it. I also have more experience in specific fields relevant to our project than the other people in my group due to the combination of pre-uni subjects that I did.
Overall this means that I’ve been motivating our group and done a lot of the work so far and I’ve effectively ended up as team leader. We’re on track for a solid project, but I can see that I’m not doing a great job of it from a team working perspective – I tend to ‘lead from the front’ to the point of doing everything myself rather than letting everyone else learn how to do things, taking the line that if they were going to input ideas and do the work they would do it on their own initiative. It’s resulted in the project basically being controlled by me, driven mostly by my input and along my ideas and forcing those in the team who want to be part of the project out to the side.
The project itself is also a bit hard to work around. In the first phase, the group worked collectively to get ideas together, but once the project got going we ended up in a phase where only 1 person could really do stuff with the rest just adding suggestions to try and incorporate before everyone else’s workload increases during the final part. We’re currently in phase 2 but I can see how the others can try and work on things to help me, the person doing the majority of the work at this point, I just don’t know how to get them to do so.
As for my teammates, 2 of the group are willing to work and competent enough to trust, 1 is not competent but is willing to ask questions and do work, 1 is not competent but doesn’t try and often excuses himself because he doesn’t know enough to work, and 1 rarely shows and is pretty useless when he does show up. I don’t care about the 2 that aren’t trying but I want to involve the 3 who are because I feel like I’ve cut them out of the project. The 3 who are willing lack the confidence to take their own initiative though, which alongside not having experience is what separates them from my working style.
Though I definitely think I could do the whole project on my own, it’s a short project and not super hard, I don’t want to do everything myself as I want them to learn and improve. I do want to guarantee a good grade though and not have everything happen in the last few days (which again I know I could take over and do it alone at that point but the others don’t have the experience and confidence to put in the right amount of effort before the deadline starts looming so it might happen that way anyway). I’ve never led a project before, I’m much more comfortable when I’m being given a task to do all by myself.
Does anyone have any tips on how to delegate effectively and get everyone involved in the project without making a complete mess of it? I’m not amazing at communication so ideas on how to explain what they need to do effectively would also really help. I’ve looked up some resources on team leadership but I just can’t figure out how to implement a lot of the techniques shown and some of them don’t apply to our situation, so any good leadership resources could help as well.
1 comment
honestly I’ve found that the best leadership resource out there is always my actual team. talk to them!
– what do they think is going well?
– what areas can they see where improvements could be made in team processes?
– what does each of them want to do more of?
– what tasks can you do as a pair with one of them, so you’re increasing their technical skills while also increasing your own ability to explain and delegate? there are surprisingly few tasks that can really only be done by one person – might be worth googling pair programming for some examples of how to make seemingly-solo tasks easier and better through teamwork
some of the answers might surprise you, and they’ll be more specific than any random thought leader’s article on leadership.
in terms of how to break down work for other people to pick up, you might want to run a sort of agile-esque planning session. something like:
– use a tool like trello that lets you list out tasks and add details to each task
– write down all the tasks that need to be done in a to-do column – try and break the tasks down as small as possible.
– talk about them as a group. for each task, write down what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and how you will know the task is complete. if there are deadlines or dependencies, write those down too. in agile situations the aim is that you include enough information on each task for anyone in the team to be able to pick it up, but that’s probably a bit extreme for your situation.
– put the tasks into a sensible order, making sure all the tasks which require a previous task to be done first are marked as blocked.
– if there are tasks that particular people need to do, put assign those tasks to those people – I’d encourage you to be really ruthless with yourself about whether you are the only person who can do each task.
– whenever someone starts a task, they should assign it to themselves and then move it into the “in progress” column, and then when it’s done it can go into “done”. they can then unblock any tasks that depend on it.
– tada! now you have a resource that let’s everyone see who is working on what and what they can pick up next.