The Other Guy

Amazing things happen as deadlines approach.  Generally competent people begin to panic and that panic clouds their judgment, their communications skills and their ability to function.  Way back in psych class, we learned about how individuals are hyper vigilant to danger cues, remember those cues related to their fears, and will assign threatening interpretations to ambiguous cues.  In English, that means that everything bothers them and they stop functioning.  What they do a lot of is pointing fingers.

I’ve seen it on a number of projects of the years.  A team works well together but as the due date materializes and there are lots of loose ends that need tying off, someone casts the first blame.  “I would have finished that but…” and someone else is to blame.  You feel no guilt since it wasn’t your fault.  You were ready to hold up your end but…

My response?  That’s crap.  Inevitably, there is a project leader whose job is to lead – to give each member of the team what they need to get their part of the job done, including a deadline.  It’s everyone’s responsibility to understand the dependencies, get what they need, speak up in advance if they don’t get it, and to persevere to get what’s missing in order to get their piece done on time.  Shrugging one’s shoulders because someone else failed doesn’t alleviate your failure.   It compounds it.  That’s why you need to be proactive.

So if you can’t write a report until research sends you the data, you need to be damn sure that research is working on the data, knows when you need it, and is going to deliver it in a from that’s usable.  If you’re late because they’re late, it’s not the other guy’s fault.

As you can probably tell, I’m big on giving people responsibility.  Along with it goes accountability.  That doesn’t mean there won’t be mistakes or delays – project scopes change, new roads are taken, people make honest errors or change their minds.  That’s how we learn and grow.  But we can’t do it in a vacuum and we can’t throw the blame on the chain’s weak link.  Because if the chain breaks, we all fail.

Clear?