“Oh, that project is behind because Platform Widgets doesn’t talk to us.”
As humans, we do this thing, where we ascribe people-ness to things that aren’t people, and we talk about those things in ways that we would talk about other people. Pets are a great example of this – and wild animals too, but it’s also true for inanimate things, like cars, and also things that aren’t things at all, but just, abstract concepts, like “New York State” or “HR”
“Everybody knows if Subscriber Acceleration is involved, our timelines will go out the window.”
This can be a nice way to make our lives more interesting – naming your car as a teenager felt like almost a rite of passage in the early 2000s! – but it carries some risk when we start to let our understanding of how humans interact and work over to more abstract concepts, especially in the workplace or when working with governmental or nonprofit organizations.
“Why can’t Global Avian Legal get their story straight?”
The problem is, when we start to think about “other teams” as singular, seamless atomic units, we start to make some simple mistakes:
- We assume the whole team has the same opinion on a project or priority
- We assume everyone on a team has the same knowledge and is equally informed
- We begin to set up a mental model where teams relate to one another directly
But that’s the thing – teams don’t relate to one another. In some very real way, teams don’t even exist, they’re a collection of people, and people are complicated, and messy, and have differing incentives and mindsets. You can’t talk to a team. You can’t take a team out to coffee. You can only relate to individual humans who are a part of that team.
When I first started at Disney, in my initial listening tour, I asked a senior colleague of mine if he could recommend any books or blog posts that would help me to navigate working at Disney, which felt like a huge battleship compared to the tiny fishing boats I’d worked on before. He recommended Ferrazzi’s now-classic Leading Without Authority (which I would also recommend to any PMs or aspiring PMs!)
One of the pieces that Ferrazzi touches on repeatedly in the book is this idea of listening to pursue co-elevating, his model of finding opportunities to achieve shared successes. “To influence others, you must first build strong relationships,” he says.
The thing is, you can’t build a relationship with a team – only with another person. This is especially important for folks who work across many teams or business units to accomplish big initiatives and build big impactful solutions – you need to find ways to stay grounded to the actual folks doing the work, and push back (in your own mind at least!) on the anthropomorphizing of teams.
The best way to know that it’s time to build a relationship with another person, or to encourage a leader working with you to develop a 1:1 relationship, is when you start hearing people say things like those called out above.
When you yourself, or someone working with you, starts assigning motivations or personality traits to a team, be alert! An opportunity for greater collaboration and clarity awaits if you dig one layer deeper:
“Who on Platform Widgets did you talk to?”
“Who on Subscriber Acceleration usually sets timelines?”
…and then, go talk to that person!
Simon Ouderkirk 