It's sad to hear the news about Adele cancelling her Vegas residency and the choice to do this has caused quite a lot of discussion and upset in some quarters. If you look at this decision though, and some of the responses to it, it highlights a lot of the challenges that we are all working through today thanks to COVID.
One of the key things that seems to be coming out around delivery is around expectations.
Why Expectations matter in times of COVID
We’ve been working under difficult circumstances for the past couple of years. Being able to deliver projects has felt a lot harder in the current context - be it supply chain disruption or managing a ‘home-first’ organisational structure.
What seems to be key today is the understanding and communication of our expectations - because, if we all work alone a lot more, understanding what people want from us, and in turn, what we want from a given situation - seems to be increasingly important.
When you’re starting a project that’s looking to deliver something in COVID times, it might be good to ask yourself the following questions?
- How realistic are your expectations? When considering this - it's probably good to ask if you’re basing your timelines for any delivery or events on the assumption that the world runs on the same level of efficiency as the pre-covid days.
- How much do your expectations depend on other people? This is another key question to ask yourself? If you have key dependencies on particular staff, how are you going to support them - also how do you build a team structure that means everyone is connected and valued and feels like they can contribute to the success of a project, without being stressed or ground down by an unrealistic timeline?
[A random picture of the dawn which looks nice from here ]
Keeping these questions in mind, both at the start of an endeavour and while it's running can help remind you about the constant challenges any project faces. Additionally, some things, that I’ve found can be helpful when trying to unify and support teams for delivery are as follows:
Three interrelated things that it might help to remember
- Defining roles at the start of a project. We all have quite different perceptions to roles and boundaries in general, but having the flexibility to understand that they may help in certain situations is useful. Defined roles give a kind of certainty to a project, which is important at the moment. We often crave some kind of certainty in a crisis, so this can help. This is where it's important to use roles as a helpful guide for organisation and, if used effectively, to help create healthy boundaries within the project. But then, it's necessary to be aware of their flip side - they can create siloes and tension, if people adhere to them too rigidly. This is where trust is important in a team, and the answer seems to be consistent communication and a shared awareness of any current problems or issues in a project.
- The need to over communicate (especially by managers). This is crucial, and it's hard. Like most things at the moment, the work managers used to do in the office, now has to be replicated in a predominantly virtual setting and communicating with teams in this context is a lot of work. Personally though, I feel it's what you need to do to bring people with you, which is a lot harder to do with virtual-first teams. It's even harder when you consider that everyone communicates differently, some people only use emails, some people save things for virtual meetings, others want everything through slack/github/[insert name here for whatever productivity tool you wish to reference]. So for any given project, you may have a myriad of tools that people prefer to use. To address this, it seems the best solution is to over communicate - use asynchronous communication (emails or slack) but also try to have some form of regular meeting in which you make a point to go back to the plan. Then, again, try to have some flexibility about how people work with those things - people may not be able to engage with the slack pings or attend meetings, so keeping some kind of simple reference point (perhaps some kind of summary update that gives important delivery dates) so people know where things are, at that point in time, seems to help. This isn’t necessarily easy to do, but it does seem to really help everyone know what the expectations of the project are, if they have changed, and how they can help fit into them.
- Building trust within the team and with your customer. Everyone is going to experience a challenge from time to time and in a pandemic it’s a given. One of the things that may have happened during this whole challenging episode is that we have learnt to judge a bit less (dropping the use of ‘should’ when we talk about how we think others could behave) and try to understand each other a bit more. This works two ways - firstly, it's important to develop trust within your delivery team - supporting each other (often emotionally) through the current trials and challenging environments is key. Secondly, it's crucial to keep good communication with your customers and clients as well - they too will be having to adapt to the challenges that COVID is throwing at them. So by being up front and communicating any challenges you are having is an important consideration to make.
These points above are just reflections I’ve formed over delivering projects over the past couple of years, which is honestly really quite challenging. I think that the possible mistake that can be made is trying to maintain that things are ‘business as usual’ - like some pre-COVID delivery environment, should be the norm. Right now, we are a long way away from that and it might be good to update our expectations around when it will be ‘normal’ again.
Anyhow, these are just my thoughts - hopefully they resonate with anyone else's experiences in the current environment - I wish you all the best and good luck with your current endeavours!
