Goldilocks and the three states
Whether you are a leader or an IC, if you are juggling several priorities each of your projects or efforts will be in one of three states:
Too hot — the passion and energy is excessive, the team’s spending too much time or effort on the project… ideally you step in to calm it down before things spiral out of control;
Too cold — folks aren’t showing enough interest and there’s a danger that the project will stall… ideally you rally people around to get it back on track with an appropriate level of investment from the team;
Just right — the team’s focus is well-aligned with the project’s needs… you don’t need to change anything.
This suggests two key skills that it’s good to build up, regardless of your role:
Quickly identifying which state a project is in
Spotting the signs early when a project is moving from one state to another
Together, these two simple things can help you to focus and spend your time on what really matters.
You may ask, “That’s all well and good, but what if I don’t have anything in the ‘just right’ bucket?”. That can happen, there’s nothing in the categorisation dictating the distribution… it’s up to you to pick your battles and move some of the 1s and 2s into 3 :)
