People and Projects

If you look back at your career thus far, think about the teams you’ve been a part of. If you had to pick a team that truly stands out as one of the best, which would it be? Whether you were the leader or a team member, what factors led to that being your best team?

I’ve had the opportunity to ask that question to team members from all over the world. Though the answers vary, there are common themes.

• “We trusted each other.”
• “Team members were highly competent and totally bought in.”
• “We could disagree but still enjoy each other.”
• “The leader helped us all do our best.”
• “We delivered great work.”

Great teams are often the result of great leadership. By that, I don’t mean just the brilliance of one good leader who is the boss. Rather, it’s leadership demonstrated across the team, including the person charged with heading up the team.

There are many helpful definitions of leadership. One of my favorites comes from Justin Menkes, author of Better Under Pressure. Justin told me during an interview about his book that “leadership means maximizing potential—in yourself and in the people you lead.”

If you are the leader of your team, I’d like to challenge you to consider that definition. What are you doing to maximize your potential? And how could you maximize the potential of your team members?

Maximizing Your Potential

I’ve had the opportunity to coach over 250 executives. Every once in a while, I come across someone who says they have 20 years of experience. But after spending enough time with them, it becomes apparent they have one year of experience repeated 20 times! They haven’t been actively, intentionally growing. They’ve been living off what they know and it’s keeping them from maximizing their potential. Liz Wiseman suggested in our interview about her book Rookie Smarts, that you must continue to seek ways to be a rookie—not just relying on knowledge you’ve already mastered. That’s risky yet required territory to travel if you want to maximize your potential.

And The Potential of Your Team

And how about your team? Perhaps not every team member has the same potential. Certainly, not everyone has the same levels of ambition or talent. But what are you doing with the team you have? How are you challenging them to experiment and grow instead of stagnate and wilt?

In our keynote Lead Teams That Deliver the Goods, we have an open discussion with the audience about characteristics of best teams and practical strategies we can employ to maximize the capabilities of our teams. It’s easy to think that we could do better if we just added stronger team members. Yet, as Donald Rumsfeld has said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have.”

Don't Settle For Less

Once you've tasted what it's like to work with a high-performing team, your tolerance for mediocrity significantly diminishes. Don't settle for less.

Your responsibility as a leader is to maximize your potential and the potential of your team members. Develop a great team and you can deliver great products.

Join the conversation! What was one of the best teams you’ve been on? What made it such an effective team? What questions or comments do you have about maximizing the potential of your team? Leave a comment below.

Andy Kaufman, PMP, is a keynote speaker who helps organizations around the world improve their ability to deliver projects and lead teams. He is the host of The People and Projects Podcast, which shares interviews with experts on leadership and project management. Click here to learn how to earn free PDUs by listening to The People and Projects Podcast.

You’re sitting across the table from a person who is losing it. They’re upset again. It could be your boss, a key stakeholder, a customer, or even a member of your team or family, but the fact is, when the formula includes You + Them, the result is a meltdown.

If you lead people or projects, conflict is inevitable. In his insightful book Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer, Michael Roberto talks about the differences between cognitive conflict and affective conflict. You need cognitive conflict—this leads to better solutions because well-intentioned people are actively disagreeing—even vigorously—to end up with a better solution. If you don’t have a fair dose of cognitive conflict with your team, Roberto suggests it could be a sign they just don’t care.

But that’s not what this post is addressing. I’m talking about affective conflict—when the line of respect gets crossed. When emotions and biases cloud judgment and people stop listening to each other. When a personal win is more important than a shared win. When you walk away from that meeting and you feel like the life was sucked out of you.

Affective conflict sucks. Yet here you are again, with it screaming in your face.

Dan Shapiro is the founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program. The guy knows a thing or two about highly emotionally charged conflict and negotiation. He consults with the hostage negotiation arm of the NYPD. He gets Palestinian and Israeli leaders to the table and helps them make real progress. He facilitates sessions with world leaders to show how they are often too apt to prefer seeing the world explode than solve its problems.

And Dan released a new book this week that can help you deal with that person across the table.

Negotiating the Nonnegotiable (Viking, April 2016) helps us look at the issues underlying the most emotionally charged conflicts and offers insights on how to stop the pattern of craziness that too often ensues.

There are no easy answers to the most challenging conflicts we face. But Shapiro lays out a case for how these conflicts are not typically a matter of rational differences. They’re not even just about the emotions raging. Under it all, Shapiro argues it often is a matter of tribal differences: who we are vs. who they are. This tribal mindset can be seen in a range of conflicts, from marital disputes, to arguments across organizational silos, to clashes between nations. It’s likely an issue with that stakeholder across the table from you.

In Negotiating the Nonnegotiable, Shapiro shares practical lessons about how to recognize when you’re barreling down a path of what he calls vertigo—where the conflict is so out of control that we’re disoriented—seemingly unable to perceive what’s really going on. He provides vocabulary around how to recognize therepetition compulsion—the self-defeating patterns of behavior that just get repeated over and over. And he shares perspectives on office politics that alone are worth the price of the book.

If you’re waiting for that person across the table to resign or get a job in a different part of the organization, you will probably have a lot of birthdays. If you’re sick of the affective conflict and can muster up the open-mindedness to chisel away at the underlying problems, Dan Shapiro’s new book is a great place to start.

You can hear Dan talk about some ideas from Negotiating the Nonnegotiable in this interview: http://PeopleAndProjectsPodcast.com/148. When the yelling calms down, I recommend you listen to it.

What are some of your most challenging conflicts? What are some of the most important lessons you’ve learned about trying to resolve those conflicts? I invite you to share your lessons below in the comments.

What are you supposed to be doing right now, instead of reading this article?

I ask because there are countless demands competing for your attention, right? Your inbox. Text messages you need to return. Headlines in the news. A stakeholder who needs something. A problem at home. The deliverable due in a few hours. Something that went wrong on a project. An angry customer. A demanding boss. Something that you’re supposed to remember to do but can’t quite remember right now. Oh yeah, and this article.

Distractions bombard our lives. It’s an unrelenting attack of competing demands, all vying for at least a moment of our attention. Gloria Mark’s research finds that typical information workers are interrupted once every three minutes. Lest you want to lay the blame at the feet of millennials, open floor plans, or technology, Mark found that 44% of the time we interrupt ourselves!

Life in the Shallows 

We live in the shallows. Getting time for deep, focused, uninterrupted work is rare for most of us. If deep work was a species, it would unquestionably be on the endangered list. And it takes a toll on our projects, our organizations, and on our very selves.

What if your ability to succeed wasn’t really about your IQ? Or the number of hours you work? Or your title? Or your looks or the family you grew up in or the college you graduated from?

What if your ability to succeed as a project manager in the years ahead came down to this: your ability to focus. I’m talking about your ability to carve out undistracted time, pushing your cognitive capabilities to their limit, allowing you to create new value and improve your skills. 

After coaching hundreds of executives, one common thread I’ve seen across the most successful leaders comes down to what they focus on. The most successful have developed the ability to focus on the most important things, most of the time. They are less susceptible to being distracted by the trivial. 

We all are gifted the same 24 hours a day. The difference is what we pay attention to.

Deep Work

I recently interviewed Cal Newport about his book Deep Work. Newport offers up his Deep Work Hypothesis: the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate the skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

Makes sense. But certainly you must be tempted to think, "Cal is an academic! What does he know about the realities of my business life? He doesn't know my project load. Or boss. Or demands at home." Or whatever objections come to mind that convince us that deep work is no longer possible in today's work culture. 

Well, before you get back to what you're supposed to be doing anyway, here's the seed I'd like to plant. I’m taking Newport's hypothesis as a challenge and I invite you to join me. I'd like you to join me in cultivating the ability to get more deep work into our weeks, making it the core of our working life.

In my next post, I’ll share some practical insights from Newport’s book Deep Work. For now, here’s where you can listen to Cal Newport talk about his book, in his own words: http://PeopleAndProjectsPodcast.com/144.

I'd love to hear your thoughts! What are some practical things you do to stay focused on the most important priorities, most of the time?

If you lead projects and people, you inevitably face difficult people. In fact, some of these people seem downright crazy.

I’m not necessarily talking about certifiably mentally ill though that may be the case in rare circumstances. The crazy I’m talking about is the person who acts irrationally. They explode in anger at seemingly nothing. They are overly emotional. They are convinced that others are out to get them. They have an incessant need to be right.

These sorts of crazy can make work and life a chore. A burden. They can suck the life and joy out of what we’re trying to accomplish. And some of us face them regularly.

How do you deal with the crazy that sits in the cubicle across from you or in the office down the hall? Dr. Mark Goulston shares ideas in his latest book entitled Talking to Crazy: How to Deal with the Irrational and Impossible People in Your Life.

To help arm you to deal with the challenging people in your world, here are some key lessons from the book.

Lean Into Their Crazy

The main premise of Talking to Crazy is that you cannot reason people out of their crazy. Mark suggests that we must “lean into it”. Too often when someone is acting irrational, our instinct is to convince them that it’s not that bad. Or that they don't see things clearly.

The truth is you are right. They don't see things clearly. But trying to convince them of that, especially when they are at the height of their irrationality, is fruitless. Actually, you’ll make it worse.

What you see as resistance to change is persistence to them. What you see as complete nonsense is, in their eyes, just further proof of your cluelessness.

I had an executive coaching client convinced that she would get fired from her job. The more she obsessed on that fear, the more irrational she became. Further, this cycle of crazy led her to give every reason to lose her job. I can’t count the number of times I tried to help this person understand that her company was not out to get her. I vigorously explained how her flawed thinking was leading her down a path to the unemployment line. I tried to be rational in the face of her irrationality. And she was just convinced I didn’t understand (a view reinforced when she eventually—and unnecessarily—lost her job).

That’s how crazy works. When you next have to face that person, try to remember that their irrationality is rational to them. Efforts to convince them otherwise will just make things worse.

So, what do you do?

Keep Your Poise

Leaning into crazy starts with letting the person vent. Instead of following your instincts to shed light on the situation, let them unload their irrational thoughts. Don’t take it personally.

Dr. Goulston suggests this is an opportunity…. An opportunity for poise. Of course, that’s easier to say than do, but here’s the wisdom behind that approach. Goulston states that “stripping you of your poise is among an irrational person’s best weapons, and refusing to surrender your poise is one of your best defenses.”

I had a friend who suggested sometimes, you need to meet power with force. If someone pushes you, you need to push back at least as hard. I’ve seen situations where that was called for. But if that’s been your approach in the past and it’s not making things better, do whatever it takes to keep your poise. As George Bernard Shaw observed, “I learned long ago, never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” Stay out of the mud by keeping your poise.

Stay Curious

I’m increasingly convinced that the source of much conflict is that people aren’t listening to each other. I’m not suggesting that all conflicts can be settled by heartfelt conversation, but an important skill when dealing with your crazy is to truly listen. Goulston suggests that you stay curious. After letting them vent, ask questions. Look them in the eye as they speak. Goulston even suggests focusing on their left eye. But regardless, stay curious as you listen to their rant.

Donny Ebenstein suggests in his book I Hear You you should listen so well that you can tell their story as well as they can. You don’t have to agree with their story, but you want to listen so intently that you could communicate their concern or frustration so effectively that they understand you’ve actually heard them.

Listening to truly understand is monumentally challenging in the face of crazy. And if the person is violent or goes over the line of respect, the best thing might be just to walk away. But assuming it’s safe, stay curious. What are they feeling, thinking, and doing? (Goulston calls this F-T-D Delivery). Listen so deeply that you understand their perspective, even if you disagree with it.

What’s Next?

By now you’ve held back from trying to convince the person out of their irrationality. You’ve listened well enough to have a better understanding of where they’re coming from. You haven’t interrupted so the person might start to lose some of their intensity. Where do you go from here? 

It depends.

You’ll need to get Talking to Crazy for the full arsenal of options, but here are a few for your consideration:

• The Belly Roll. Goulston suggests that “sometimes you win the battle by surrendering.” If you are in the wrong, admit it and ask, “What do you want me to do?” Or maybe you are not in the wrong, but you just don’t know what move to make. Goulston suggests something like, “If I say or do something, it will make things worse. If I don’t say or do something, it will make things worse. Given that I have very little confidence in what to do now, I need you to tell me what you need me to say or do to make the situation better for you. What would it take to make this right?” Depending on the situation, the best approach to dealing with the crazy might be to humbly go low.
• Picture Your Mentors. Goulston suggests that our response could be informed by visualizing how our mentors might respond. Bill Hybels, host of the Global Leadership Summit, suggests that, when faced with a challenging problem, ask yourself “What would a great leader do?” How would a great leader respond to the crazy you’re facing? How would the best boss you ever worked for respond?
• Anticipate the Crazy. Goulston observes “Irrational people will predictably escalate if you disagree with them, say no to them, tell them they’re wrong, or ask them to do something they don’t want to do.” We may think they’re so unpredictable, but in fact, you can sometimes anticipate the crazy. In Peter Bregman’s book Four Seconds, he asks us to watch for when we say, “I can’t believe they did it again!” His point: stop being surprised they did it again! Of course they did! That’s what they do! By anticipating the crazy, you may be able to avoid or mitigate it in the future.

 There’s no simple formula for dealing with the irrational and impossible people in your life. But there are ways to improve the odds that the crazy people in your world don’t take you down with them. To learn more about Dr. Mark Goulston and his book Talking To Crazy: How to Deal with the Irrational and Impossible People in Your Life, I invite you to watch this recent interview with him (and earn a free PDU).

What are your tips and tricks for dealing with crazy? I invite you to share them as comments below. Thanks!

Andy Kaufman, PMP is the host of The People and Projects Podcast, available at http://PeopleAndProjectsPodcast.com and all podcast apps.

In an upcoming episode of The People and Projects Podcast, I'm interviewing Mark Goulston about his book Talking to Crazy: How to Deal with the Irrational and Impossible People in Your Life. 

I would love your help with the interview! I'm going to ask Mark to respond to some specific project-related scenarios, and I'd love for yours to be one of them!

What's an example of an "irrational and impossible" boss, sponsor, team member, customer, or other stakeholder that you've had to deal with on your projects? What are some specific things they did that made them so difficult to deal with? How did you try to deal with their craziness? What was the impact of their craziness on you, others, and the project?

You're invited to leave your examples as a comment below. As a matter of respect, please don't use the real names of people.

UPDATE: The episode is now live. Click here to read about it here on ProjectManagement.com.