Why Good Intentions Are Good For Nothing
Whether it’s in our personal or professional lives, when someone asks you something; be it a favor or a project task timeline, you want to do your best to help them out. You want to do your part and make everyone happy. The issue is that everyone has multiple facets of our lives to juggle and prioritize and some do it better then others. When people drop the ball and don’t make their commitments, even though we have the best intentions, that task or favor still doesn’t get done and others pay for it. No matter how good our intentions are, it doesn’t magically make falling short on a commitment any better.
The Value of a Good Intention
Let’s break down the value of a good intention:
Pros:
- The person that had the good intentions has a way to rationalize not meeting their commitments
Cons:
- The task didn’t get done
- The rest of the team is disappointed
- Others on the team may need to take on additional work to keep things on track
- Hard discussion with team member that neither they or the manager want to have
Jerks Don’t Have Good Intentions
The real bummer about good intentions is that they almost always come from nice people. They genuinely want to help or do their part. It’s much harder to have a hard conversation with a nice person then with someone you don’t get along with. (That’s a whole other post.) Most people have something like a family or car issue that comes up occasionally and it’s no big deal. Life happens. Chances are that those people will work harder to catch up or meet their commitments. The issue is when you have a nice person on your team that continually falls short because something “came up”. As a manager, you need to talk to this person as soon as you identify the trend.
Prioritization and Proactive Communication
So what do you talk about? Every time I’ve dealt with this, it’s never been a trust or deceit issue. It’s always been a priority and communication issue. If it’s not dealt with by the person in a timely fashion, it becomes a trust issue even though that person isn’t intentionally lying because the rest of the team can’t believe them when they give estimates and deadlines. You need to let the person know that they need to prioritize their work in a manner that will allow them to meet their commitments. You’re not telling them to miss their kids’ games or give up their social life. They’re grown adults and they need to figure out how they’re going to hold their weight with the team and earn their pay. Your goal is to let them know it’s an issue now so they’re not surprised if you let them go later. I have yet to have an experience where the person doesn’t realize that it’s starting to become an issue. The hard part for them is realizing that others see it too and figuring out how to best manage their time.
The other thing you need to get across is that they need to proactively tell the team when they know they won’t make their commitments instead of waiting until something’s due to give a status. This allows the team to proactively manage and share the tasks in order to stay on track instead of reacting and scrambling after the fact. While this is still not ideal in that the rest of the team has to cover for the person, it’s making the most of a not-so-good situation.
Anti Up
Long story short, people that continually make commitments and miss them need to be addressed as soon as possible. Having a nice person with good intentions is no better then having a blatantly obvious deadbeat on the team except that the deadbeat is easier to identify and even easier to get rid of. Help your good people identify when this issue is starting to happen and make both of your lives easier.
