On paper, management is easy. My job is to put the right person, in the right place, at the right time. What’s so hard about that?

It’s only when you attempt to put it in practice that you learn that management is more art than science. Sometimes the person with the skills you need on Project B has already been assigned to Project A. Sometimes there is a change in the industry and you have to start training your staff and hiring people with the new skills. Sometimes the very nature of the project changes and requires a skill set that is not the employee’s strength.

What’s a manger to do?

Know Your Team

Everyone has a strength, and everyone has a weakness. I have managed wonderfully strategic thinkers who could lay out a compelling vision that made me want to go live in their future, but who struggled mightily when it came to delivering detailed specifications. On the flip side, I have also managed highly efficient tacticians who were challenged to look beyond the day to day details and articulate a long term plan. Even the Jack-of-All-Trades have personal preferences that make them better at one thing over others.

As a manager, there are several courses of action I take here.

The first is to match the right person to the right project. Unfortunately, the entire premise of this post is how difficult that is to accomplish, which quickly brings us to our second and third techniques:

• Create teams of people with complimentary skills and personalities. A strategic thinker can elevate the breadth of a tactician’s designs just as the tactician can lend weight and depth to the strategists visions. An unstoppable combination, if they work in harmony. But if they cannot get along such a partnership will quickly shift from constructive to a nightmare.
• Help team members broaden their skills.I like to work with my team members to identify areas that they are personally interested in improving in and then trying to provide opportunities for them to acquire those skills. For example, if an employees wants to learn Aure, I will encourage them to check out resources such as Khan Academy and Codecademy or match them to a mentor who can instruct them. The other half of this technique is to identify projects where they can practice their new found skills, otherwise the lessons will be lost. Of course, this benefits the organization as well, since with a broader skill set there are more places and times when the employee will be the “right” person.

Trust the Team

To me, micro management indicates a lack of trust in the team. Of course, paying no attention to the team carries it’s own set of risks. As with most things, balance and moderation is the key.

What I always try to remember is that there are many ways to solve a problem. I focus on pointing the team at the objective and articulating the desired outcome, and then let them solve the problem of how to get there. I’ll offer tips and guidance and provide plenty of feedback to keep them on track and on time, but I don’t get hung up on how they go about solving the problem, as long as they solve it.

Recently, my team was heading into an executive presentation and the young lead wanted to try something radically new. Rather than the standard boilerplate setup, she wanted to open with a creative metaphor in which she compared the application we were developing to a five star restaurant, thereby highlighting the concept behind the designs. It was a unique approach to the problem, and it achieved the objective, which was to clearly convey the overall intent of the design. Knowing our executives could be conservative in their tastes and that this approach was not without risk, I supported her experiment. Of course, I wouldn’t be telling this story if it didn’t end happily, so it should come as no surprise that the executives reacted positively to the new approach.

Know When It’s Time to Make a Move

Sometimes you have the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time and no amount of support, training, or trust is going to save the project. These things happen. Maybe the project is too big. Or there is a skills mismatch you didn’t anticipate. Maybe there are distractions elsewhere that the employee cannot overcome. Or maybe they’ve been on the project too long, grown bored, and quality is beginning to suffer.

The best thing a manager can do is adjust quickly. I have had plenty of situations where employees languishing on one project thrived after being reassigned to something more appropriate. These moves are usually a relief to the employee, as they are almost certainly aware things are not going well, and keep the project from turning into a nightmare situation for everyone involved.