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this. They are surprised and unhappy that their project manager doesn’t know enough
about the project to glean even the most basic status; they also feel that they are not
responsible for reporting their status upward. The project manager always goes to the
team members, so they don’t ever feel the need to report problems unless directly asked.
If all project plans and work products are kept as a matter of public record, the team
members don’t need to deal with a project manager constantly bugging them for status
reports. If the project has transparency, each team member is responsible for his own
status communication.

If your team is falling behind, don’t just ask them for their status—this will encourage
them to give you excuses. Instead, gather the status yourself using the documents that
you have made public, and ask them about specific problems. Transparency only works
if you make it clear that there are consequences for poor performance, and that poor
performance is evident from public documents. Given this, people will see what’s
required of them in order to do a good job.
Don’t be afraid to let your team make mistakes
People learn from their mistakes, and it’s important that they be given the opportunity
to make them and take responsibility for them. If they are going to grow professionally,
it is going to be through their own experiences and through trial and error. Without
this, team members will never see that their success takes effort to achieve. If a micro-
manager simply corrects all of their mistakes and redoes their work, they have no
incentive to learn or improve.
It’s okay for your team to make mistakes, as long as you’re on top of it. The way to stay
on top of mistakes is through the peer review tools. This allows team members to share
information and help each other to grow to a standard that is in line with what the
project needs and what the organization requires.

Make your mistakes public
If you make mistakes, you need to communicate them to everyone around you. It’s okay
to make the wrong call. Good managers recognize when they have made mistakes and
correct them. The best managers publicize those mistakes so that everyone can learn from

them, and so no one is blindsided by them.
When a team member makes mistakes, the project manager should share in the responsi-
bility. Many project managers don’t realize that they are culpable for the mistakes made
by their team members. The reason the manager is culpable is because he assigned the
task to the team member, allocated the resources to do it, set the priorities for the project,
and set and communicated the deadlines—all of which were contributing factors.

For example, if somebody makes a bad decision because she failed to understand the
project priorities, the project manager shares the responsibility for the error. That doesn’t
mean the project manager is solely to blame—if there were 20 people in the meeting
where that priority was communicated, and 19 of those people understood it, the one per-
son who ended up making the mistake should have spoken up at the time. But it still

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