Steering Your Craft Home
“What work do you do?” On a 3-hour van ride from Portland to Seattle, I’m getting acquainted with my traveling companion, a young man with cerebral palsy and an expressive face.
I look at him and quickly calculate: late teens, smart, no corporate experience, disabled. I think: no jargon, no obfuscation, no complicated theory. I’ve got to come clean.
“I teach people how to get along with each other and get things done. At the same time.”
His eyebrows shoot up and his face brightens. He nods. He GETS it! It may be the first time I’ve gotten it out in a sentence, and I’m grateful for the exchange: Finally, the Cliff Notes version.
What I love about those two sentences is that they leave nothing out. They describe what it takes to lead in a team-based world. What it takes to succeed. Get along with others. Get things done. Relationship and task, not one at the expense of the other.
If work were a rowboat, you’d want to row with both oars in the water, pulling equally. Pull more with one than the other and you go off course. Row with only one and you go in a circle.
It’s so easy to forget this.
Right now, I’m working with an organization that’s in love with email and chasing a huge backlog of tasks. They get a lot of tasks done via email, which is a good thing. Email is good for tasks. Face-to-face is better for relationships. Too many transactions by email and you’re putting quite a load on relationships.
How do you know which oar to pull on?
In a rowboat, you face backwards – away from your goal. You can’t see where you’re going. What you do is pick a point on the horizon that’s opposite where you want to go and row so that you are moving away from that point. When you pull too hard with one or the other oar, you veer off course. In a rowboat, it takes commitment to maintain that unwavering focus.
It’s like that at work too. The minute you see that you’re headed off course – someone misunderstands you, HR or legal enters your project wants to add months to it, your team stalls and you don’t know why – the temptation is to pull harder on the task oar. You send the email explaining the merits of the project, the necessity of the timeline, how you’re executive sponsor is bigger than theirs. It’s a natural reaction to start pulling with the task oar. Now your boat is going in a circle and you’re very tired.
This is the time to put down the task oar and put some energy into the relationship oar. Call the person in HR and listen. Get to know their point of view. Make a connection with the person you’re talking to. Listen for common ground. Look for ways to move forward together. If you can’t find any, admit it. Impasses happen.
If you’ve got to part company, do it face-to-face when you can, on the phone if you can’t. Don’t do it via a snippy, self-justifying email. I know you’ve got an impossible deadline and you think this will waste time. Except it doesn’t. Time spent honoring a relationship is never wasted. It takes so much less time to talk to someone on the phone then it does to compose, send, then worry about the snippy email.
Give it a try and let me know how it goes.