From the Ask Tom mailbag:
Question:
Knowing that Time Span is part of who we are but also develops with maturity, is there anything a manager can do to help a team member develop his/her highest potential Time Span?
Response:
If you remove the words Time Span from your question, we have an age-old managerial quest, how to develop team members to their fullest potential?
Conceptually, Time Span gives us a way of measuring complexity related to a task assignment. In what ways can a manager help (influence, cajole, coach) a team member to develop their Applied Capability to more effectively complete task assignments?
Here’s my general advice. If you want to develop a person (or a team), give them a real problem to solve. Exercises, ropes courses, contrived case studies fit nicely in MBA programs, but there is nothing like a real problem to stimulate real growth.
Beginning managers know they need to delegate, so they pick off pieces of usually meaningless, make-work stuff and pass it off, keeping the tough stuff, the meaningful stuff for themselves. In the beginning of a manager’s career, deciding what to keep and what to delegate is a difficult decision.
Time Span is the measuring stick to help a manager make that decision. Inspecting the “by when” of a task assignment gives us insight into the complexity of that task. Developing a team member is a process of assigning increasingly complex Time Span task assignments. Paying attention to the Time Span of tasks gives a manager a way of organizing the developmental process. It makes coaching more scientific.
We’ve given a real world assignment, the resource seems to handle the immediate but can’t seem to go from there to planning the week out from a few days to the week. It’s not interest in the task nor lack of training. Is this an indicator that this person cannot increase his time span? Are we failing to offer something that is within our ability to provide?
Hello Tom,
My name is Carolina Erique, Im originally from Lima-Peru and I just started my major on Management with a concentration on marketing at National University.
Aside from helping team members by giving them the opportunity to resolve real problems on their own. I believe informing team members about their individual performance is a good way to interact. Managers need to give the right positive feedback so that team members can feel that their effort and work is being recognized.