my team member has too many ideas and can’t prioritize
A reader writes:
One of my team members is answerable for determining how we will manufacture new designs and ensuring our outdated designs are nonetheless sturdy. And he’s nice at it — he’s super-smart and retains on prime of the newest expertise. He’s so nice at this, in actual fact, that each month or so he’ll give you a advanced challenge to enhance our outdated designs that may take a number of months to implement. He’ll insist it’s one thing we want. But my job is to stability the brand new work with the outdated, and he chafes at these limits. He will get visibly pissed off that the team can’t simply tackle these enhancements as he comes up with them whereas additionally persevering with with the outdated ones and finishing new initiatives, and he hates that now we have a checklist of his ideas which may by no means get labored on. In his thoughts, each enchancment is equally beneficial. If I ask for the highest 10 out of 25, after a lot prodding he’ll say possibly we will drop one or two, however all of the others are completely vital.
However, I’m not his direct supervisor. If I have been, I might’ve sat down with him and mentioned, “Prioritization is a job requirement, we can work on it together, but the bottom line is you need to get better at prioritizing or else.” But I don’t have an “or else.” The team plans our workflow quarterly and weekly, which helps, however doesn’t put a lot of a dent in his lengthy checklist of ideas. Do you will have any ideas for a way I can push this team member to prioritize?
I reply this query — and two others — over at Inc. at the moment, the place I’m revisiting letters which have been buried within the archives right here from years in the past (and typically updating/increasing my solutions to them). You can learn it right here.
Other questions I’m answering there at the moment embrace:
- My present worker requested me to be a reference of their job search
- My worker married a coworker
