5 Considerations for Distributing Your Team’s Work

Keep these five things in mind when you’re splitting up the work for your team.

A key task as the leader of a high performing team is how you distribute work across the members of your team. It needs to be done fairly. Note, I didn’t say equally. Work allocation needs to be done fairly because you want perceptions of equality. You want people to work on things they’re good at but also that they’re excited by. There are five criteria to think about when distributing work.

1. Priority

First, consider the priority of the work in terms of the team’s goals and the organization’s goals. Priority needs to drive everything. If a project is a top priority and somebody’s available to do that work, they get that work. And you need to allocate it appropriately.

2. Skill Sets

Second, consider the skill set of the person who you’re thinking about distributing the work to. If they have the right skill set, you’re going to get a high-quality result. This also prevents people from failing. You’re giving them something they can be successful with.

3. Availability

Next, consider availability. All things being equal in terms of priority and skill sets, who is free to do the work? Who has the bandwidth? You shouldn’t be shifting resources from one project to another when you have available resources to pick up that new project. If you start shifting resources around between projects when you have available resources elsewhere, you’re going to lose momentum on that first project and that project might fail.

4. Development Opportunity

Next, you have to think about the development opportunity this project might present for that person because that’s how you’re going to take your team to the next level of performance.

5. Interest

The last consideration is, “Does somebody have an interest in it?” If someone is really interested and passionate about a project, you should let them take it on. They’re going to be really motivated, excited to do it, and hopefully their performance will follow. Now one caveat here: Make sure people don’t just gravitate to the work they enjoy doing and stay away from things that they’re not comfortable with. They’re going to end up getting pigeon-holed and they’ll be very narrow in their focus.

If you think about all these considerations as you distribute work across your team, it’s going to ensure that you tackle the highest priority projects with the people who have the right skills to do them. You’ll be able to successfully execute the project while also developing your team’s skills.

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