Hardest Part of Projects
(Photo by Lina Khalid at Scopio)
Projects, projects, projects. Sometimes the science or the technology is seriously difficult, but it usually isn’t the hardest part.
As I’ve said before, to accomplish anything truly big, you need a team.
If you’re trying to invent or build or create something significant, something that will make a difference, you’re trying to move a mountain. That isn’t a task for one person alone. You need a team. Believe me, the team is usually harder than moving the mountain.
Why is this on my mind?
January has been a tough month. Two endeavors in particular needed to get past specific markers. Perhaps you remember the saying that any technology sufficiently advanced appears to be magic? One has to do with a growing set of clever software to help certain types of businesses operated better. Do it right and it seems like magic. The other aims to invent a substance so amazing that as shorthand I simply call it magic, skipping the explanation that it’s actually technology.
Each endeavor has teams. Plural. Teams composed of people.
People impose bureaucracy. They distract each other, fight with each other, upset each other, interfere with each other, even sabotage each other. They miscommunicate. (Remember the satellite that failed because one of the groups working on the project worked in metric measurements and the other in inches?) They shrug off responsibility onto someone else, maybe without telling the other person what just got tossed onto their desk. They make mistakes, don’t follow through or don’t read instructions. They wander off course. They get sick, overwhelmed, insecure, too swaggeringly sure, afraid, reckless…
Everything in that paragraph has cropped up at least once this month, and more. I’m supposed to be the project manager. I’m supposed to wrangle it all.
Some of those naughty things were done by me. I didn’t intend to. That’s what everyone else who messed up something, small or large, would say too. They didn’t intend to. A few of them wouldn’t mean it, but most would.
These teams are maddening not only to me as project manager, but to themselves and each other. There are moments when each of us in these teams would love to be anywhere else enjoying peace and quiet, doing our own things and not needing to interact with each other.
These teams are necessary. The magic can’t happen without them. Maddening human interactions are part of the price of creating powerful magic.
When I say you need a team to accomplish something big, I can make it sound like every team is a delight. Sometimes they are. But the truth is that even when I’ve gotten a taste of world class teams, those teams haven’t been friction-free. The human factor keeps on being the hardest part.
Nobody can be superb at everything. The most stunningly brilliant geniuses I’ve worked with have tended to have less than stellar relationship skills. Expand that to a team, and the more raw intellectual power a team has, the more it’s likely to have some members whose social skills are not the best… in which case the team needs somebody who is maybe not at the topmost level of technical skill, but great at helping other people get along better.
My social skills are not the best. There have been moments this month when I felt that deficit down to my bones. There have been moments when someone else in a team stepped up to make a situation turn out well where I might not have managed the human side of it so smoothly. The person whose potential distress was averted didn’t even realize they could have ended up feeling distressed. I love having teammates able and willing to subtly avert a crisis that way.
When I think about it, even if I had glorious people skills, that wouldn’t be the answer. In a good team, the incidents of rescue by social grace need to move around a little. If they’re always dealt with by the same person, the team becomes unbalanced. Everybody has to at least try to get along as best they can.
It isn’t the wizardry or the magic the project will make, but it’s the hardest part… the people.
I'll share this with my son Ryan. He's the UI designer for a video game designer and experiences frustration working with people sometimes. I guess we all do. I have a knack for rubbing people the wrong way when all I'm trying to do is do the job well. I inadvertently challenge the lack of skills in others, or purposely challenge my bosses who don't follow their own rules yet expect me to play by them. I got off on the wrong foot on day 1 of a three-week "leadership" course when we were given a task that involved measurable goals. I knew what we were supposed to do, but I didn't realize that more important than doing the job right was to gain consensus among my teammates in the 30 minutes we had to work. (I guess that's what leadership is.) One of them was nearly hysterical in wanting to see what the other group was doing first. Another obsessed over semantics. I didn't realize I had so deeply offended those two women. They made it personal. They also spread mean gossip about me to the rest of the class, planned an after-class party right in front of me and never invited me, never spoke to me or looked at me in the hallway, and ignored any contributions I made to any of the other tasks. It was like sixth grade. I felt so sorry for them. I've been moderately successful in organizing activities such as an Art Market or a petition drive, but mostly I prefer to work alone. Give me a task and it gets done. Doing it right is much more important to me than stroking egos. If I knew how to do that in "Southern lady" style I'd have been more successful in that class, I think.