Setting Good Deadlines with TEA

Fools and wicked people impose absurd or abusive deadlines on team members. Wise leaders help teams arrive at deadlines that increase achievement. Here’s a recipe that has worked for me.

Target: Leader proposes a deadline.

Estimate: People responsible for the work evaluate and adjust based on both the work itself and what else is going on.

Agreement: Everyone on the team commits to it. The people responsible can count on the leader and teammates to help make it happen.

This is about internal deadlines, part of a framework to support planning and improve performance. Know why you’re setting deadlines. Some people really need them to perform well. Others stress unnecessarily about them.

There’s a lot of deadline misuse and abuse going on. I could probably write a book.

This post was inspired by “Toxic Behaviors that Poison Teams” by Dan Rockwell. Dan inspires me often.

Image (c)2017 by Cindy Shelby, CC BY 2.0