Readtime: 3.5 minutes
A few weeks ago, someone who’d just started working for me finished a piece of work I’d set as a three-day task.
She walked me through it for an hour. It was thorough and well thought through, exactly the sort of thing you’re relieved to get back from somebody new.
Then, right at the end of the call, she said something I wasn’t expecting. The scope had been bigger than three days, and she should have come back to me when I first explained it and said so, rather than just doing it.
I hadn’t seen any of that. I’d set the task one week and asked her to report back at the end of the next. I was paying her by the day at that stage, and we’d agreed three days, so I’d assumed she’d spend three days on it somewhere in those two weeks. Where those days fell, and how long each one was, I had no idea.
My first reaction was practical. We worked out what was realistic to complete things and moved on.
It was only afterwards that I noticed what had happened. I’d spent an hour looking at that work and thought it was thorough. The size of the task wasn’t visible in it. If she hadn’t said anything, I’d have come away thinking my three-day estimate was about right.
What I’d been doing for years
The uncomfortable part was realising how long it had been since anyone had told me that.
In my previous job I handed out work constantly. I’d size each piece in my head, roughly, and the number I came up with was nearly always how long it would have taken me.
Which is the wrong number. I’d been doing that kind of work for 15 years. I knew where everything was, who to ask, and which bits could be skipped. The person I was handing it to didn’t have all of that, so the same task was a different size for them. I was estimating my job and giving them theirs.
And it was rare that somebody came back and said it had taken twice as long as I’d implied.
I took that as evidence that my sizing was good. What it actually meant, I now think, is that the people doing the work were absorbing the difference. The three-day job took five, the extra two days came out of an evening and a weekend, and the work came back on time. So from where I sat, the estimate was right.
Every time that happened, I got slightly worse at sizing work, and slightly more confident that I was good at it.
Why nobody says anything
I don’t think the people I was handing work to were being martyrs. The arithmetic is just against them.
If you tell a senior person the job they gave you was too big, you’re telling them they got something wrong, in a conversation that’s otherwise about your work. Many people, quite understandably, decide the extra days are easier to deal with. And the more senior the person giving the instruction, the harder that conversation looks, so the more often the days get absorbed instead.
Which means the more senior you are, the less feedback you get on how long things should take. Right when you’re deciding it for more and more people.
There’s a knock-on I only saw later. Your people learn how big your “three days” really is, and they start building in the extra time before they’ve even read the task. The whole team runs on an unspoken correction that you’ve never been told about.
What she did
The person who told me was new. She was also the expert in what she was doing, not me, so she knew what it really took. I think that’s partly why she could say something. Good for her.
The people who’ve worked for you for some time might conversely be less likely to say something.
So a question for this week. What did you hand over recently that might have been bigger than you thought?
The person who’s got it probably knows already.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
P.S. I’m writing a book – Outsized Leadership: How to Make a Bigger Impact with Less Effort.
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