Ten Ways To Make Leading Project Teams Less Unbearable

Thanks to John Foster!
I met this guy once who'd just been made team leader. He was a veteran of all kinds of projects. He'd been on dog projects and sucker projects, but he'd also been a star a couple times. All this made him determined to run this project right. He opened our first meeting by saying he hated long meetings. He smiled and said, "we've got a lot of work to do here, but we'll all be out of here in 45 minutes, and we're not going to miss anything." Everyone laughed sympathetically. The meeting went 2 hours. His next one did, too. Later they got a little shorter, but I'm not sure he noticed. He was too busy trying to run an adequate meeting to worry any more about running a perfect meeting. You can’t create a perfect meeting by decree.

Here are 10 tips for running better project teams.

1. Forget about running a meeting as though you rule it. Generally, the people on your team are at the same level as you. Nobody likes being lectured to about obvious things, furthermore lecturing that way reveals you as stupid. If something is obvious to you, it is obvious to other people, meaning simple solutions were tried a long time ago, and have failed.

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