Over-communicate

Do not take for granted that your message, plan, ideas, and other aspects of your work are obvious or easily understood. They might be easily understood by most of your team, but if even one person is unclear on the plan, that will slow things down or cause bad outcomes.

This is not to say that you should talk a lot, or spend a lot of time in meetings. But you should be very clear and communicate on details that might seem obvious to you so there is little or no room for misunderstanding.

I cannot emphasize enough that this does not mean lots of meetings, long meetings, long emails, stand-ups, and that sort of thing. It means clear, detailed communication that is as unambiguous as possible so that everyone is on the same page.

It also means more frequent updates than you might think are necessary. The updates can be very brief, but should be frequent so that there is very little lag between progress (or roadblocks) and updates to your team.

Dashboards or other common methods for real-time updating might be the best path here. Think, “How can I make sure my team is as tuned into the real-time status of this project as possible?” Your job as a leader is to figure out the right cadence and then over-communicate relative to that cadence.