Sondra finished her project over the weekend.
“Last week, you assigned this task to Dale, but you ended up doing it,” I observed. I could tell she was very pleased with the project result, but miffed that she spent the weekend working when Dale had all of last week to work on it.
“I thought a lot about what you said about being more explicit about my deadline. Next time, I will try to remember that,” Sondra replied.
“More than that, the target completion time is essential to the task assignment. Dale gets all kinds of assignments. To complete them, he has to use his own discretion, primarily about pace and quality. Most of the decisions he makes are about pace and quality. Without a target completion time, he has no frame of reference in which to make his decisions. His ASAP will ALWAYS be different than your ASAP. ASAP is not a target completion time.”
Sondra smiled. I took a look at her project. It was really very good. She will make her client meeting today and life will go on.
There was also a follow up missing from this equation. Sondra should have not only said more specifically when she needed the project, but she could have added the completion request time frame in a scheduled follow up meeting or call such as on Tuesday morning, “Tom, where are we on such and such a project?” or better yet, “when do you expect such and such a project to be complete?” followed by a “great! I’ll check back with you on…” (I like to select the day before due day for those follow ups or ___ days before if I need more wiggle room for corrections and completion).
I agree with a previous post that ASAP becomes about most jobs with some organizations, which is very irritating and a sign of poor planning or overcommitting.
You could be a great leader and include in your follow up something about “what may I do to help you?” or “what do you need from me?” something along that line to show you are committed to helping get the project done and ease the burden you’ve put on your team. As it is, the end result was the leader completing the whole project as opposed to pitching in to get a portion of it complete. It’s very easy to dish out commands and then blame other people for them not being completed. It may also make for a lazy team if they know, eventually, the team leader will just do it themselves.