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What strategic avenues can you close off to avoid trying to be all things to all people?

 

I have been working in the IT services industry for the last 12 years. We work in teams where everyone has specific roles and responsibilities. I have had some experience a long time back, where I had a project manager, supervisor, team lead. And the problem for team members happened when these people give different directions in a crisis. 

In my experience, for our project, we did not really have a proper plan to execute a project, and the client was providing directions. While we were junior analysts, the leads were interpreting the clients asks differently. And they were giving us directions as per their understandings which were not the same.

It caused us a lot of rework and the end of the day we got a dissatisfied client as their requirements were not being met and they felt misunderstood/ unheard, I would imagine that must have been frustrating.

I was not a team lead but just an analyst, being a team member, I had to do what I was being told. So, the quality of work or deliverable was not good and as I mentioned the client was not happy. Client was frustrated and escalated about the bad quality of our work. So, approach of listening to many people did not work.

On hind side, being objective and focusing on goals usually works. Listening to many people with different direction is never a good idea. Now I try to understand the goal/ objective and the expectation of client and communicated to my managers. I have been working in a leadership position for a long time and did not face such a situation in a long time. I have learned over the years that when we work directly with clients, there are some decisions we can take autonomously, keeping our managers/ supervisors in the loop, instead of going to them every time and consulting them. Eventually, they start appreciating the proactiveness and start trusting the decisions. And clients start trusting too.

Being a junior resource in 2008, lack of confidence was one of my weaknesses along with a lack of experience.  But as with time I gained experience and confidence, I found the opportunity to work directly with clients, to keep a direct communication channel which helped us reduce confusion and different directions. The strategy to cut out layers and having direct communication worked fine for our team.


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