Conversations on failure to deliver and commit

TL;DR: In today's news, we see how to make people not take conversations personally. And now... back to John with the weather forecast!

When working with teams, and usually when you are the product manager/owner/person it is important to get what you need delivered (hopefully what you need is what solves the problem). You are however not the one executing the work, and work is known to be delayed.

Therefore it is often important to set on others (who are actually executing the work) the importance and urgency of their work.

I found however that in a new and forming team a direct approach (“you said this would be done”, “I need this done in this Sprint”, “if the commitment was made why is it not complete?”, etc.) rarely brings the best results. I find this to be many times due to personalization in the interaction with an I need YOU to.

That being the case, a strategy that I found to work quite well in these cases is to create a way to depersonalize the communication and conversations to be had so that priorities are met.

This is done by using a communication of OTHERS need US to.

This strategy has three main advantages. For one it removes the personalization of “you”, making it so the conversation can be immediately taken as a personal attack. Then it focuses on the resolution of the problem through “us”, reinforcing the team bounds and showing that there is a team responsibility, which puts everyone taking part in the conversation on the same side. And finally it puts the need in a group of “others”, a third party who is interested and may be even invested in what is being done, that may even influence what we are doing even if they don't have authority.

With this we can put it in practice as in the following examples:

• We really need to deliver this task because the stakeholder is eagerly waiting to see the results it will bring.
• When we made the commitment to the stakeholder he was very expectat of what we were going to deliver. How can we still show some results in this field?
• We are promising much more than we are delivering which undermines the expectations of the stakeholders, we need to either deliver what we promise, or start reducing the expectations of what we can deliver.

These examples are far from exhaustive but they can be adapted to a great deal of situations. The word stakeholder can and should be replaced by someone real, like a team that depends on us, a client, or even an invested director. Someone that has a face to give to the “others” we talked about in the beginning. Also focus on our first person plural pronouns as in the examples..

I need YOU VS. OTHERS need US

This strategy allows us to start conversations that, in any other way, might be hard to start. Being that if failure to deliver and to reach what is expected continues we can recourse to the first examples using “you”. However, after starting with the “we” approach for some time, further conversations where an emphasis on “you” might be needed will be better received as there is a built rapport already.

Now, let's not forget, that being this a strategy to work with teams or individuals, each of them is singular and different from every other person/team there is. They may need different approaches, and this is not a solve all strategy. Use your discretion and ask for advice where and when needed. Just remember that when in need there is nothing like approaching someone in your network that might have dealt with the same issues before for some good old brainstorming.