Why Your Team Can’t Get Things Done
Great vision, great strategy, great project ideas – all areas on which business leaders spend countless hours and dollars annually.
For example:
VISION: We are the Trusted Resource for everything our customers need for patient care in our area of therapeutics.
STRATEGY: We will deliver personalized proactive customer outreach underscoring solutions to pain points our customers have every day.
PROJECT: Implement a state-of-the-art CRM and Thought Leadership drip campaign to our customers.
All this makes sense, so why doesn’t the team rally and do it? The real question is:
Whose job is it to organize the work, facilitate the discussions, rally the team, and keep them accountable?
Who is going to develop the plan to understand what is needed in a CRM to execute a Thought Leadership drip campaign? Who is going to organize the evaluation of whether your current system can send such a campaign? Who is going to facilitate your technical Subject Matter Experts to recommend adding modules, customizing, or getting a whole new system? Who is going to lead the implementation of one of those options? Who is going to catalyze the Thought Leadership campaign itself? Who will drive the assessment of your existing content, or whether more needs to be developed? Who will structure a framework to close those gaps, and keep the team accountable to delivering?
Typically for Executives and people managers, the highest and best use of their time is not to work out all these details
Not only that but doing so may or may not be what brings them energy and keeps them motivated (reference the Working Genius model by Patrick Lencioni).
This is where having a Project Manager (with great project management skills!) comes in very handy. So when you ask the question: Whose job is it to organize the work, facilitate the discussions, rally the team, and keep them accountable?
The answer is:
The Project Manager
For the record, AJC does *not* think this role is necessarily a full time one, and it does not have to be assigned to an existing employee. Review our article on When to Assign an Internal Project Manager to determine whether you have anyone internally who can take on this role.