Scenarios Sara is a project manager buried in a series of crises and demands from her boss Michael. To get out from under, she delegates some of these tasks to her staff. John reasonably presumes that Sara and Michael will measure his performance based in part on the completion of this task. Peter and his team are working on a project that he has been told is very important to his company. It is near the end of the development cycle.
Time is short.
There are problems with the project that require higher management to make some hard decisions, but they are busy handling other issues and are slow to take action on, or apparently even notice of the issues that put Peter's project at risk. The project team culture is based on the reality of the team's actions, as demonstrated by Sara's delegation of an unimportant task in the first example. It is also based on the perception of the team's values, as experienced by Peter's team in the example. People most often act, for good or ill, on their perception of reality. A Model of Employee Stress Individuals within an organization are smart enough to recognize when organizational behavior is, or is not, consistent with Covey's principles of effective time management.