Getting the Right Things Done Right

You are frustrated because in the last month, three engineers on your team did the wrong things on the most critical project:  The first engineer completed his task, but only using an expensive third party software package.  The second engineer had three critical tasks to do and only completed one, along with a lot of low importance features.  And the third engineer completed the wrong task because she thought something else was more important.  So, questions rattle around in your head:

• Don’t they all know there is a tight schedule?
  
• What about costs - don't they care?
• How can they spend so much time on non-critical tasks and not get the critical ones done?
• Why didn’t they let me know there were problems?

Rather than calling your team together to express your frustration, you decide to take a walk to think about what to do.  You think back to how you gave your engineers their assignments…You caught them in hallway when you saw them getting coffee and you were running to a meeting.  None of them had pencil or paper handy and you were in a hurry, so you didn’t have time to really talk about each task and they didn’t come back to ask for more information…
Hmm… Maybe the problem isn’t the team after all. Maybe the problem is my not properly delegating the tasks to the team.