Setting deadlines
Agreeing a completion time for delegated or allocated tasks.
Giving people deadlines is a common, and necessary, activity for any manager. The fascinating business of getting results through other people inevitably means that you need to know completion times for delegated and allocated tasks. (Delegated tasks are ones where you are accountable; allocated tasks are ones where someone else is accountable.)
Attitudes to deadlines vary enormously. In some organisations an agreed deadline is sacrosanct even if heaven and earth have to be moved to meet it. In other organisations deadlines are not taken seriously and there are few adverse consequences for missing them. In macho set-ups imposing impossible deadlines is often a ploy used to sort out the 'men from the boys'. In more enlightened working environments, deadlines are always agreed taking other commitments and priorities into account.
There is much to learn from deadlines, whether agreed or imposed, and each time you set one you are unwittingly providing the other person with a learning opportunity. Examples of lessons learned are:
- to speak up assertively and refuse to commit to an unrealistic deadline (you get the deadlines you deserve)
- to give the earliest possible warning and re-negotiate a deadline which, for unforseen reasons, is going to be missed
- how right Northcote Parkinson was when he said 'work expands to fill the time available for its completion'
- the different effects, some motivating some demotivating, of tight deadlines
- how necessity is the mother of invention
- how impressive it is to take the initiative and volunteer a self-imposed deadline (even better if you stick to it)
- self-insights into the tendency to procrastinate if a deadline is too lax
- to ask questions and establish the reasons for a deadline
- how to negotiate and reach a win-win deadline that suits all parties
- how to build in margins for error and the unexpected and therefore make it easier to meet deadlines
- how personal credibility is enhanced if work is occasionally delivered ahead of time.
It is intriguing how an ostensibly mundane activity such as setting deadlines can be a seed pod with the potential to germinate so much learning.