A classic reason why stuff doesn’t happen is that no one takes responsibility for it. You see this on a big level—I’ve had clients that were in partnerships where all partners checked out and nobody was directing the ship. However, they also happen at the micro-level, a bunch of people discuss something in Slack and then, that’s it. That was a great Slack discussion! The end.
There’s a classic solution to this problem, and it works well, but too often people don’t have the confidence to do it. No matter how small the task is, always assign an owner. Down to the smallest level, “it would be great if all the articles on our site were tagged. Hey Mike, do you want to do it?”
But how do you assign an owner if you’re not the boss? (Too often, bosses are so nice they don’t want to force task ownership on anyone. And even if they do, if you do it, then you’re making their worker easier!)
There are a few ways.
One way is to always volunteer to do it yourself. That is very common and works well, but as the work grows, that’s not sustainable.
A second way is to ask if there are any volunteers, just to always initiate the conversation. And the key here is to not let people wiggle away from ending the conversation without anyone owning it.
A third way is to make a suggestion. A “nice” way to do that is in question form. “John, this seems like it’s up your alley and you’d enjoy it. Want to take the lead?” (Note “take the lead” is a euphemistic way of saying it, to make people feel better about being assigned a task!) Note that if you’re a low-level or new employee or freelancer then asking a question is an innocuous way to get this point across as well.
There are three bonus tips I’d keep in mind while assigning ownership.
One is to make sure you keep track of who was assigned what. It’s good to write it into meeting notes, but also in a list. That way you can keep track of which ones were lost in the shuffle and follow-up.
Two, on the smaller level, the owner needs to have complete visibility into every little detail of what’s happening. As you get to bigger levels, it gets harder, but the smaller is critical. Above, I gave the example of someone owning tagging the articles; that means that I don’t go and create a tag myself, but I ask Mike to do it, or, if I do create a tag myself, I alert Mike to it, so he can know which tags were changed or added.
This example shows why it’s important, even at the small levels. If I add a tag but Mike doesn’t know, he won’t know that tag was created, so he would likely create a similar tag at some point, thus leading to double-tagging, and then a whole process would be needed later to clear it up!
Another is to keep this in mind even at the teeniest, tiniest level, and respect that. And by “tiny,” I mean, “tiny.” Even smaller than merely tagging. Here’s a common example of a situation that’s even smaller than just tagging articles but too common: an email is sent to too many people, and each person thinks someone else is responding, so no one does. Someone needs to take ownership of responding to the email. Perhaps if emails are sent to a group and no one responds within a certain period of time, you can respond, or back-channel that no one has responded to make sure the best person does?
