Ever get the feeling someone isn’t telling you everything?

Ever get the feeling someone isn’t telling you everything?

The numbers in your tracking report do not reflect the same story, or the numbers are reflecting everything is okay?

Trusting your gut is an intuitive piece that kept us alive for centuries. Ok sure we aren’t exactly hunters and hunted in the physical sense but these instincts are still useful.

I love putting my hands up for projects, tasks I have never done before, it’s a good feeling not to know it all. However, its an uneasy feeling with a new team that you may not have handpicked, trust must immediately be present otherwise you will find yourself too far into the detail and unproductive.

Trust is a strange concept in the work place, as we are all different and trust in different stages, some prefer to have relationships before they offer trust, some might never trust or it could be a case like my personality you have mine, till you lose it.

On projects you usually have a limited time to kick off and there needs to be an element of trust in order to drive the team to the finish line, on some occasions you will have a team member who is more of an independent player, a solo autonomous worker, That is ok.

They have great value and there are metrics you can use to ensure everything is on track.

You can identify these personalities quiet easily and mark your project task break down to test your theory (gut intuitive) again independent players are good, you need them.

But in this case let’s talk about a rouge team player, they produce the work , they clear their check points, but something still doesn’t feel right, how do you check if you intuition is right?

That they are causing a weak link in your deliverable?

You request they brief the project team, do not give them a scope to brief, just the instruction to brief the team on the tasks they were assigned, you must be a participant, not a driver in this meeting.

Your role in this is to then check the dependant tasks off against the completed briefing.

Once you are satisfied with the explanation have the team member explain the process task theirs is dependant on, yes this is owned by someone else, but if they cannot explain it, it means they do not have a contingency or risk consideration built into their plan. Hence uncovering your gut instinct to be true.

Further steps you can take is having the dependant task owner present and do a hourly count of when one task starts, duration and end.