What to do when supervisor doesn't follow the time schedule?

Question

I currently work in a company with ~10 people. My supervisor is also one of the business owners. My job description is related to product management, where I have to prepare tech specifications, communicate those between developers, business owners and customers. Make sure that what we communicate will also be the deliverable. However, almost every time, tasks are interconnected with tasks that other team members have to do. My colleagues are most of the times on-time. But, my supervisor is not. 8 out of 10 times, she just delays her part which makes the whole project get delayed. And when we are close to the deadline, we either have a half-baked project or we postpone it. We have discussed that quite a few times, but it's still the same. I know that if the problem was with one of my colleagues, I should have talked with my supervisor. But now, she has the time management issue.

I have decided to change my job and look for another company. So, my question is, how should I avoid a similar case in a fresh start? What if my supervisor affects my work and there is no supervisor above her to talk with?

Location: Europe

Answer 1

This would be excellent to discuss at a retrospective or some other form of continuous improvement activity.

You might ask to have a topic at the monthly team meeting, "what I really liked about work in the last month / what I wish was different".

It may take some effort and time to get to the bottom of the time management question you've raised, but along the way, everyone in the company will start to trust each other.

Answer 2

To answer your direct question: Anything you want to know, you can ask in the interview. The interviewer will always give you a chance to ask questions, so ask, something like: "How does your team manage tasks that are interconnected? What happens if one team member is late with their part?" or something like that.

As for your current situation: This, by itself, is not (in my opinion) a reason to leave the current company. The thing is, as you mentioned, the person who is causing these delays is a business owner. The business owner is the one who is most interested in the business succeeding: They have both the most to gain when the company does well (in terms of product sales/contracts, company stock valuations, acquisitions, etc), and also the most to lose if it doesn't (they have the most invested in the company in terms of time, money, equity, etc). Everyone else, yourself included, has much less to lose; you work, you collect a salary, if you don't collect a salary then you find another job, easy as pie. So, the business owner has a vested interest in making the projects succeed. If they are not doing that, then they have only themselves to blame.

Now, if the project is late, and the business owner is making it late, and the business owner accepts that the project is late because of their part, then there's nothing actually wrong here, so long as you're getting paid and you have no reason to believe that that will change. Where I would consider a job change is if the business owner is making the project late and then, when the project is late, they blame you and your team, or if the project is late and that is causing customers to become upset and stop contracting with your company which is causing you to hemmhorrage money. If this lateness on the part of the business owner is actually negatively impacting you directly, then sure, but if the project is just late with no other negative impact then I think finding another job over this issue is probably overkill.