Expanding the Bandwidth of Team Members

Before leaders can assign new tasks and projects, they must know who on the team has the capacity to take on additional work without sacrificing the quality of their current tasks. 

Determining who has the bandwidth to take on more right now and who doesn’t is one of the most critical assessments leaders make. Get this assessment wrong, and leaders have the potential to derail team member productivity and commitment. 

Giving a task or assignment to someone who doesn’t have true capacity creates frustration and dissatisfaction and can lead to burnout. However, gauging the bandwidth of any team member is much more complex than meets the eye. 

One reason is that bandwidth is unevenly distributed across the team. Bandwidth is heavily influenced by process, skill, and work ethic. 

How much time it takes for one team member to complete an assignment is rarely identical to the time another team member will take. A more skillful team member with a better process will get more done faster than a colleague who doesn’t enjoy those assets. Add work ethic or commitment to this equation, and then the ratio becomes even more imbalanced. 

Another issue is attitude. 

Ask some team members if they can take on more, and they will always say Yes. They will do whatever it takes to perform for the team and leader and agree to more, even when this is a disservice to their well-being. 

Other team members will always respond No to the same request. They perceive themselves as always stretched to capacity, whether they actually are or not. 

So, relying solely on what team members say they can do often creates task inequity on the team. 

Many leaders prefer instead to rely on past performance, quality of work, completion rates, and adherence to deadlines to assess bandwidth. They combine this context with work standards, attitude, and existing assignments to decide who might have more capacity. This helps make a more accurate assessment but still falls short of ideal. 

The best leaders do something different. After reviewing the current tasks and assignments of each team member with the appropriate skill to effectively complete the assignment, they decide if there is anyone who can indeed do more. 

In the common situations where that is not the case, they select the team member best suited to the assignment, and they create bandwidth for them. 

They do this by taking a current assignment off their plate, temporarily postponing or delaying a task, lowering or rearranging existing priorities, or assigning one of their tasks to someone else on the team. 

Gauging who has true capacity is always the first step, but good leaders don’t stop there. They realize that on busy teams, more capacity is a hard thing to find. 

The fact that a given team member’s bandwidth is not equal to others, it is essential that leaders learn how to expand bandwidth through their actions and choices. 

Bandwidth is an intellectual asset, one that leaders are capable of growing.