Life After A Leader - A guide for how a project can survive when an integral member of the team leaves.
Life after a leader
A guide for how a project can survive when an integral member of the team leaves.
“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations" - Charles R Swindoll.
When our flagship project for the year came around, I was confident that as our core team with over 10 years of experience and the newly acquired enthusiasm from our amazing new leaders, I felt like this year was going to be our very best and the start of our project taking off and with 90% of the core team remaining what could go wrong? Well in the lead up, our course leader told me that he wasn’t able to attend the latest project and had to leave, I was terrified. This leader had been integral to the project for many years, so much so that he was one of the first staff members on the team, nearly 10 years ago. He has run our flagship project for all of these years and ever since I have been involved I’ve had complete faith in the project, but now he wasn’t there and he had left a big hole to fill, the excitement had quickly turned to panic and worry.
As a project manager you, yourself are trying to navigate this change and also trying to provide support and guidance for other members witin the team. Initially this is difficult because you have to confront your own worries:
The way my brain works is until I have found a solution or have been made to feel comfortable then the problem will roll around my head, which is both a curse and a blessing.
So, what were my concerns? Feeling like the wheels will come off the project: this leader is integral to the project, he helped established the vision and guided the team to pursue that vision. Now that he’d gone there was an air of uncertainty. My worries were – whether this would ripple through the team (confidence of own ability and projects ability) causing members too leave, feel less confident/more stressed.
I wanted to have a Plan B…and a Plan C,D. I think you get my point, I wanted to be prepared. Assess - I looked at if I felt this person could be replaced, like for like, the new leader 2.0. I concluded this wasn’t possible as this leader bought so much to the project and no one on the team had the same level of experience. It also got me thinking that other staff members have incredible skill sets and it would be an injustice to them if they were ‘forced’ into his shoes. This left me exploring other options; adapt and evolve.
“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations”- Charles R Swindoll. On our team we have great leaders who are always after new opportunities and we have budding music leaders who were once participants and are now trainees. This was our great opportunity to continue running this project and to adapt and evolve.
Adapt - We split his responsibility as a ‘song writer’ between two leaders. Both of which had past experience with this specific project but hadn’t had as much as experience as other core members. This was not only due to the leader’s unavailability but also an adaption of a model. We had predicted that more than 10 young people would sign up for song writing and from past experience we knew that 4/5 songs between two leaders was stretching our resources, however 10 between 3 song writers felt more manageable.
This leader also brought a very interesting way of song writing which meant that our instrumental leaders were tasked with being involved in the early stages of the song writing process. Historically the instrumental leaders would start teaching covers on the first day but with them needed elsewhere we gave the opportunity to our trainee music leaders - this was a huge success.
Evolve – So does that mean this new model is better than the previous one? I feel like that’s a matter of opinion but what I do know is this model worked with this current set-up. Empowering our trainees has been vital to this model and now it’s been tried and tested could be the way forward with future projects.
So to summarise:
Assess the problem
Adapt the model to suit the project
Evolve the team and the project.