Have you ever been at an impasse that seems difficult to overcome, because you just have no way to navigate through the complexities and unknowns that lurk beneath the surface?
Imagine you are working happily along in delivering key results over time that you are tracking and reporting incremental progress on towards an objective, and then suddenly, the next key result your working on becomes hideous.
You’re stuck. You know its ugly, because meetings are becoming unproductive, conversations are confusing, and elephants are beginning to congregate in the room and nobody wants to acknowledge them. You start having “after-meeting-meetings” with your team and you discuss “what {insert expletive} just happened?”.
You also know that the next meeting is going to be no better, so people are beginning to check out. This isn’t what you signed up for, and it certainly is the opposite experience of how the other key results were achieved.
Take a deep breath. Focus on the problem, not the frustration. Instead of describing the problem in terms of he, she, they or “that team over there”, describe the circumstances that appear to be surrounding the issues, and determine what the actual problem is.
To focus this even more surgically, look at organization, process and tools. Once you have established whether the issue is something like organizational capacity or readiness, or broken or unfollowed processes or the lack of automation, you can identify the gaps that can be explored, communicated and evaluated to get back on track.
Avoid naming and shaming. This is about circumstances. Work towards fixing the circumstances that can remove the barrier that causes the impasse.
That’s all I got. If you’re an EA, try to explore techniques like these, that can help you be that unbiased and trusted advisor to business and IT.
If you’re a leader, then you will need to have EAs that can help.