Establishing accountability in the absence of answerability

“Let us know if you need anything and get this done in a reasonable time frame” – What is reasonable? We all know that everything was due yesterday!

“Work across stakeholders and collaborate with respective teams to accomplish the goals at hand” – But the resources are just accountable to me but have different team leads and hence are not essentially answerable to me. 

As the face of corporate leadership has undergone rapid changes due to the impact of remote working in this time of what seems like an endless wave of pandemic crisis, there has been a slow but steady rise in the dilemma around managing cross-functional teams without an existing rapport with them as they may belong to different parts of the organization or may even be vendor teams. 

This challenge is further magnified when each team has competing priorities. While everyone is laser-focused on discussion during the scrum call, what happens after the call is an ‘unknown’ unless you know if the team is 100% committed to your project. This in no way means that work is not being done, but the situation often results in a continual sense of impending doom inspite of the leadership role on the engagement.

 Each of us would find ourselves in such a situation as the number of remote segregated teams are on the rise, and the question is ‘how’ you would deal with this challenge and not ‘if’?

•  Remember that each team member in the distributed team has limited leverage to commit to a deliverable, timeline, or outcome. Hence, if you push them beyond a point, you may be able to get a false sense of security but not a firm commitment. Instead, make the sensible choice – Request the team that they should take the time and reconnect the next day or later in the week with a response so that they may have had the time to understand their commitments across the table and would be able to provide you a sensible response. If you do not want ‘No’ for an answer, then try and settle for a ‘Conditional Yes’ – Any task is doable, and at the end of the day, you should exercise the leverage to pull the expense, effort, or resource level to get to the desired outcome.
•  Early on in my career, I worked on a high-pressure project where the deadlines kept coming on after the other. While it was a standard coffee table discussion that how come a project is always on edge, we did not feel empowered to put that question across to the concerned stakeholder. 2 months into the project, we realized that the next month was a painful never-ending cycle of regression testing. We ended up going through 12 cycles only to kill time before the production date. Were we being ‘risk aversive’ by completing the project tasks ahead of time ‘yes,’ but were we being ‘Truthful’ to the client ‘No’. The project coordinator, in this case, risked the two pillars of ‘Project risks’ – People and Client Trust. The result – While the project was a success, the following few projects were a struggle as no professionals wanted to associate themselves with an opaque effort in terms of timeline and unnecessarily exhausting.
•  While everything was due yesterday, it is up to a ‘collaborative leader’ to ensure that the ‘cost of quality is kept under keen consideration. This is only possible when the time at hand vs. the actual effort is reasonable. In my experience, ‘Miracles’ always happen with a cloud of smoke surrounding the fireworks and what is left behind is a trail of hotfixes and requirement discrepancies.
•  How can we develop equitable and symbiotic working relationships across multiple professionals when all your conversations end up being tactical as your workday is one long phone call? Something that has worked for me is to show genuine interest in the conversation and ask questions to understand the underlying themes rather than just focusing on the key updates. This ‘interest’ not only helps the team know that we are in this project together it has also saved me from a dozen ‘What now?’ moments when I am posed with a question that is in the vicinity but far enough from the update that I solicited that I am scrambling to find an online team member when it is the middle of the night at the other side of the globe.

Resist the urge to interrupt. Pause your thoughts and just listen. If you have to react, then react as a team and act to move forward. Most importantly, make others feel like their opinion matters, and they would save your life when you think there is no hope.