Managing Dissension, corralling the team’s frustration in high pressure projects and strict deadlines

Question: Do you find it easy to allow frustration venting sessions within your team or do you tend to want to quell them? Do you see teams burn out before projects get completed? If so, how often?

Work is hard and harder when associated with deadlines. Particularly for IT where an ordered deliberate focus is regularly needed to deliver components and resolve complexities. So, expect frustration to build up, quite often to boiling points. ALLOW IT. Take some time in your team meeting just to address any concerns not on the agenda. Leadership is simply humanizing the experience of predominantly utilitarian work. People are not robots or computers. You cannot punch a button and always get the same unemotional response. Add to that, people have personal lives and inner turmoil just in the natural flow of being in the human race.

View dissension and frustration as Clear Indicators that good workers are giving their all. Unless limits of the human spirit are being pushed and Brains are being challenged to their analytical and innovative boundaries, your effort will reflect a lackluster contribution of human intelligence and talent. You WANT the best resources to give their very best and that means HEAT. Fierceness. Pride in work product. Protectiveness of territory. Enthusiasm to share their idea and feeling like it’s the ONLY idea. Don’t seek to shut people up. Here’s a secret: You can’t shut people up in IT anyway. The career is far more a calling than just a job. Those that gravitate towards a role in IT are givers of greatness, opinionated, critical challenging thinkers and charismatic doers. ‘I’ve got it!’ light bulbs constantly click on throughout the IT cubicles, signs that kinetic human energy is pushing towards excellence.

Trying to stop that will get a leader mowed over. LET INNOVATORS INNOVATE. Pick up a pen and write down the teams suggested improvements, don’t eye roll and cross your arms. Indicate that you are listening because what they are saying is important. At key intervals, reinforce the need to complete the work on time with quality in a thoughtful way, ‘These issues are hard, we’ll be celebrating big time when the team deploys this solution. The leaders have chosen the right team of smart people for sure’.

I’ve seen team members rant and rave in frustration and then go back to their desk and solve major issues previously seen as impossible. I’ve heard, ‘I can’t believe we have to do this, this can’t even be done’ and then that same person figured it out.

That is the human spirit, the creative flow.

Some leaders, if not the majority, take it personally when teams are upset and inappropriate Blaming Mode. It’s normal to feel insecure about your leadership when this happens. You feel like a failure. You leave the meeting with no real Next Steps or way to increase team confidence.

I learned, ‘Tomorrow is Another Day’. So what? Let it roll off your back. It’s Ego to think just because you’re leading an effort everything will run smooth with no hiccups or dispassionate plea that things are off track.

Expect escalations from team members managers questioning the value of the project or how you are leading it. Keep your composure, demonstrate competence and be consistently supportive and professional. Displaying a cheerful good nature goes a long way. If you join the dissension instead of being the light to direct the team back to optimism, you will feel bogged down by the entire project and stop giving your all. Be the Eternal Optimist, shoulder the fear of failure and heated battle to get a team of various talents and personalities to reach a lofty common goal. If everyone could do it, you wouldn’t be as good as you are.

Use Stakeholders and Project Sponsors to the project’s full advantage. Invite them as needed to team meetings to give motivational speeches or to prioritize scope further into more manageable pieces to lessen creative frustration. Stakeholders also likely used to have one or more of the jobs the team members now have and can give some specific pointers. This can go a long way to re energize a lagging morale or break an issue open and figure out a fix.

As long as humanity is not seen as the enemy to successful projects, but the main element of them, a leader will do very well within IT or any other industry.