One thing that scares everybody, from business owners to managers, and even interns is deadlines. Seriously, even the word is composed from “dead” and “lines”, it’s clearly not a concept to be taken lightly. Deadlines are the clenching teeth of the cogwheels of civilization. You probably have some experience of facing that feeling of panic when a deadline is approaching; especially when a financial year closing is knocking your doors.

However, for a leader, it’s all about teams meeting and beating deadlines. Here’s what deadlines are and how to best manage them as a team.

Recognize the function of deadlines

Deadlines are there so that everything syncs. You need different bits to match up, to fit and synergize & sync. Syncing means you don’t get stuck and there’s energy transfer from a generator to a final objective. Or that everything runs like clockwork. Having deadlines ensures people have inputs which congregate in a way that creates a flow with a superior value. They are the heartbeats of your teamwork.

So why call them deadlines? Maybe we should call them life-lines instead.

No matter how you call them, they are a challenging thing to master, especially when working with a team. It’s a work in itself, making sure that everything falls in place at the right time. Here are some ideas on how to do it best.

Trust your team to fix deadlines – the driving force of meeting deadlines

This is elementary psychology at work: having people estimate their performance and their requirements to achieve something is going to make it a lot easier for them to keep the deadline and potentially a lot more pleasant to also do their part.

That’s not all that happens, though. Modern teams have specialized roles. This means you’re likely going to have experts working together. Experts that actually know when something will be 100% ready or 80% ready.

The number one way to make sure the deadlines are functional, is to trust your team. Think about it. You’ve met each and every one of them during recruiting. In each case, whenever you hired a member of your team, you’ve essentially chosen what you thought was the best fit for your team. So how about you trust their input? Trust that whatever they say takes how long they say it takes.

Clearly, sometimes you have to get something done by a certain date. That’s how business works. Sometimes you have deadlines that are external, those are the deadlines your entire team works against, and those are the deadlines you can’t quite meet with 100%. That’s what makes this a great strategy. When dealing with exterior pressure, your team can respond as an organism.

Overall, the number one rule of setting deadlines is insisting on team contributions to fixing them. Just picture it as a large whiteboard on which team members post their progress, making them aware of each other and their significance to the team effort. Now let’s discuss how to galvanize your team’s efforts to meet dead-lines.

Strategise your deadline-meeting efforts

Meeting deadlines have everything to do with strategizing your efforts as a team. Here are some common yet highly effective methods to meet deadlines:

1. The early deadline strategy

Having your team think everything needs to be ready by this Friday when in fact it all needs to be ready by next Friday… is a tricky strategy.

Why? For starters, you want your team to develop trust, frankness and active, participatory, teamwork.

Having everything ready 2 days before you actually need it is a pretty great way to make sure you have everything you need when you need it, how you need it.

This is not a dilemma. You shouldn’t lie to your team. Nothing stops you from calling it as it is: “the early deadline is this Friday”. Fact is, those extra days you gain are pretty useful for refining everything. There’s no denying, having a buffer, some days of extra cushion to make sure everything falls in place, that’s one amazing benefit of strategizing. And it can literally save projects. No need to worry about last-minute emergencies if the last minute is in fact 3 days after the emergency.

2. Breaking it down

This is, perhaps, a no-brainer. After all, teamwork involves each person doing a bit of a larger project. Dismantling the larger project into chunks that are manageable is a great way to ensure intermediary deadlines are met. This creates more deadlines to stress about, true, though, by definition, intermediary deadlines are also early deadlines, and we’ve covered how those are amazing.

Managing deadlines is a great deal of work, as well as managing the progress your team makes in reaching them, how various project chunks meet, etc. A great way to work this through is to facilitate the occasional ad-hoc collaborative panels.

3. Ad-hoc collaborative panels

This is counter-intuitive. After all, having people meeting up and chatting about what they’re working on is the definition of time-wasting and not meeting deadlines, right? Wrong.

People randomly chatting each other up about work they do fosters a context in which they can better understand how their various “bits of work” will fit together; it’s also an amazing opportunity for individuals to ask for help, and that’s precisely what you want.

Two brains are better than one. Teams are better than individuals. Besides, it’s all active participation, which means a lot more thinking goes on during such meetings than during large team meetings.

You can control the occurrence of such panels either directly, by establishing that every day some people should congregate for 5-20 minutes and chat about what it is they do, or indirectly, by managing the office space so that discussions such as these happen spontaneously. Recommended group size: 3- 4 people.

4. Using “modern means”- Go for Automation

Possibly the most amazing thing about technology is that it can simplify your life. Imagine how incredible it is that nowadays you can do all of the above and more by using intuitive solutions which effectively augment your capabilities.

Automating the entire project’s work can help you to set up, manage, track, meet and beat deadlines, share files and responsibilities, check the progress on various bits, chat with team members, scheduled or unscheduled, do actual collaborative team work and team communications.