Lead With Essan

Your Weekly Project Reflection

Delivery isn’t the only measure of a good week.

Before you close out, ask yourself:

✓ What decision moved the project forward? — name the call, not just the activity.

✓ What created unnecessary delay? — look for the cause, not just the symptom.

✓ Which stakeholder needs more attention? — quiet doesn’t always mean satisfied.

✓ What should I stop doing next week? — subtraction is a plan too.

Project management isn’t just about managing delivery.

It’s about continuously improving how you deliver.

One lesson, carried into next week. That’s the habit.

Save this and run it every Friday. 📌

Before Your Next Meeting:

Two minutes of preparation changes what a meeting is worth.

Before every project meeting, write down three things:

1. The outcome you want — what is true at the end that isn’t true now.

2. The decisions you need — the specific calls the meeting exists to make.

3. The people who need to contribute — who has to be there for those calls to hold.

If those three aren’t clear before it starts, they won’t be clear when it finishes.

Good meetings share information.

Great meetings create progress.

Save this for your next invite. 📌

Imagine your sponsor says: “You’ve got one slide to explain the entire project.”

Would you include every milestone, or only the information they actually need?

Good PMs don’t communicate more. They communicate what matters.

Try this exercise this week: reduce your next project update to a single page.

If you can’t, you probably haven’t identified what’s truly important yet.

To make this easier, I’ve put together a free one-page project status update template. It covers RAG status, summary, delivery, risks, and decisions required—all on a single page.

Comment STATUS below and I’ll send it across.

One project update should not be written the same way for everyone.

Executives need decisions, risks, and business impact.

Sponsors need progress, confidence, and exceptions.

Delivery teams need priorities, actions, and clarity.

Before you send your next update, ask yourself who you’re actually writing for.

The Project Assumptions Audit 📋

Every project is built on assumptions.

Most teams never write them down. Until one turns out to be wrong.

Before your next meeting, ask:
• Which assumptions are we making?
• Which have actually been validated?
• What happens if one proves false?
• Who owns testing each one?
• Which is our biggest delivery risk?

Projects don’t fail because of poor planning. They fail because teams mistake assumptions for facts.

A few minutes reviewing assumptions early = fewer delays, less uncertainty, risks caught before they become issues.

When did your project last formally review its assumptions? 👇

Practical PM tools (including my Assumptions Log Template) are in the TLD Project Coaching subscriber community — link in bio.

If your team can’t explain why a decision was made…

It wasn’t really a decision.

It was just a temporary agreement.

A few weeks later, someone asks:

“Why did we choose this again?”

The project pauses.

The same debate starts all over again.

A simple decision log prevents this.

For every key decision, capture:

✔️ The decision
✔️ Date & owner
✔️ Options considered
✔️ The rationale
✔️ The revisit trigger

That last one is where most teams leave value on the table.

Great project teams don’t reopen decisions because someone has a different opinion.

They reopen them because the circumstances have changed.

Spend 2 minutes documenting a decision today…

Save hours of unnecessary meetings tomorrow.

📌 Save this post for your next project.
💬 Which of these five fields does your team skip most often?

5 signs you’re managing, not leading 👇 (save this one)

1. You give answers instead of asking questions.
2. You track tasks more than you grow people.
3. Your team waits for your approval on everything.
4. You talk about deadlines more than direction.
5. Success depends on you being in the room.

The goal isn’t to be needed. It’s to build a team that thrives whether you’re there or not.

📌 Save this for your next 1:1
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💬 Comment LEAD and I’ll send our free framework

There's a big difference between delegating and just dumping work on someone.

Dumping says "this is yours now, good luck." Delegating says "here's the context, here's the authority you have, and here's what done looks like." One develops your people. The other quietly burns them out.

Before you hand off your next task, ask: do they have the context, the authority, and a clear picture of "done"? If not, you've got more handing-off to do.

What's the hardest thing for you to let go of as a leader?

Here’s a hard truth: most mid-project chaos isn’t a delivery problem. It’s a kickoff problem in disguise.

When a project starts without a clear definition of success, named ownership, surfaced risks, mapped dependencies, and an agreed way to communicate — the cracks don’t disappear. They just show up later, when they’re far more expensive to fix.

Save this. Share it with your team before your next project kicks off.

A good kickoff isn’t a formality. It’s the cheapest insurance you’ll ever buy on a project.

Which of those five does your team most often skip? Drop it in the comments 👇