I have mentioned burnout on this blog before, but you can be utterly exhausted and still not burn out, indeed some people don’t have that option and just keep going come what may, 1 Now many people will give you ways to identify how you know you are exhausted and warning signs and such, but say you take a holiday or a break or even a change, how do you know when you have recovered? not having a firm description will often lead people to think they are fixed when they are not.
To me the best description has always come from the book ‘Kim’ by Rudyard Kipling, after Kim has recovered from both physical and mental exhaustion:
“and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true—solidly planted upon the feet—perfectly comprehensible—clay of his clay, neither more nor less. He shook himself like a dog with a flea in his ear, and rambled out of the gate. “
Sometimes the classics are classics for a reason.
I always remember going to the office at 6am for years, watching the shift change at the main post office in Farringdon as I walked past, and seeing the utterly exhausted expressions of those who were finishing a night shift else where and were then moving on to their next job at the post office knowing, they did this week in week out.. so I would shut the hell up and get back to my corporate job knowing it could have been a hell of a lot worse.[↩]
I was recently reading “Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language” by Amanda Montell, and the author was talking about truth. The context that they were talking about was if a man would keep repeating the same thing, time and time again without objection from others, it would become the “Default truth” and in doing so it would become actually true. Again, in this context, they meant it in terms of a men vs women thing, however thinking about the actual corporate world, I realised that everyone does this to each other 1.
That default truth isn’t necessarily male versus female. It’s a thing humans do to each other. How many meetings for how many projects have I been in over the decades, where simply the loudest, most strident voice, the one that repeats their point of view again, and again and again, won.
How many of us when faced with this have muttered to ourselves, “oh, yeah, we’ll just accept it for now and then get back to it when they have calmed down”. But in doing so, you’ve accepted their truth. It’s a human trick, not a magic trick.
There are 2 things to learn here:
Is don’t let people that do this as a standard tactic get away with this without challenge.
On the meetings that you think that the only way you’re gonna get any further is to just accept what the person said and move on or take it offline. Make sure that you actually do that and bring it back up later, keep fighting, or in the end you have let that person become the truth.
Though I FULLY accept that women experience it far more than men[↩]
When you deal with projects, and you deal with issues of any type within those projects, people will state that one of them is ‘Critical’ or ‘this is a crisis’.
Now, there are strict dictionary definitions on what a crisis is, i.e.
“A crisis is a time of intense difficulty or danger”
and critical is
“Having a decisive or crucial importance in the success or failure or existence of something.”
However, when these words are used in a corporate environment, it is mainly used to massively emphasise that this is an issue or problem that the reporter wants fixing rather than it being critical for the company / enterprise or project as a whole. But it is also quite difficult to push back on as multiple people get swept up in the management of the issue.
So, I came up with what I personally class are the three definitions of critical and/or what constitutes a crisis when it comes to any company or corporation:
This is a legal or regulatory need or law. e.g. GDPR
There is a significant financial threat or gain to the company and/or project. e.g. Licence breach
There is a significant or real threat to a client of the company, either in terms of reputation or financial, e.g. security breach.
And that’s it to me, as I’ve seen in many, many corporations, everything else is merely important or very important. Only those three things are truly critical. Because if any of those three goes wrong, real lives can be effected.
I know it’s a strange item for a post, but it’s something that I feel strongly about and when ever I’ve mentioned these definitions, people have nodded and used them. So if it’s of any use to people to fight crisis merchants then please feel free to use them as well.
Does anyone have any things that they would add to this list?
Post Pandemic, a lot of us are going back into the office in a serious way, and there is a lot of push to get everyone back full time in person. But as we know, with a few exceptions this does not give the productivity boost a traditional manager would like. We have moved on from this. Everyone back in the office is just as extreme as everyone remote. It doesn’t work perfectly in all situations. A nice compromise to this has been the growth of hybrid working. And most well thought out hybrid systems work nicely. hybrid working balances letting people work at home and save travel time, and get on with work versus team communication and everyone feeling part of one deliverable.
How many days works best depends on your team, but common consensus seems to be two days a week. It’s the best long term and hits a nice balance. but that brings a question which two days?, which ones are best and which ones are valid?
Monday.
This is one of my favourite hybrid dates. I like going in to the office on a Monday. I feel it kickstarts the week. It stops you from slow starting. It actually makes you feel more involved and set your goals, however, Monday is also status update frenzy. You will not get much done on a given Monday because the first half of the day will merely be everybody chasing around to find out what everybody else is doing. It’ll be everything from setting up spreadsheets to building PowerPoint slides for senior managers, to organising sprint meetings etc, etc. You don’t actually do that much solid work. So you’ve only really got half a day. if you’re talking about teams working together, unless your teams are all benefiting from working out their sprint and their plan for the week, first thing Monday is not a good hybrid working on site day.
Tuesday
Tuesday to me is the best hybrid day. Everyone’s got a grip on what they want to do for the week or for the sprint. And now people are banging into blockers and they want to know why!. They want to discuss why, they want to liaise, fight with each other, squabble over resources, deal with technical issues. This is the day to have people in the same office, yelling at each other, getting into meetings, and resolving things with a five minute chat rather than 10 emails. You will get a hell of a lot done on a Tuesday.
Wednesday
Midweek Wednesday is a split day in my personal opinion. Wednesday is an excellent hybrid working day for senior managers because they want to see the results of the Tuesday and they want to know answers, they want to demand questions or override decisions. So for senior managers and P.M.’s Wednesday’s is an excellent onsite working day. For Tech’s / B.A. and the like It’s not, they have had Monday which was part wasted in status calls, and Tuesday in the office justifying them and getting the details sorted out. Now they just want to get on with the work so they can deliver.
Thursday
I think everybody is a solid worker on Thursday. They should be left to work this day. PM’S know exactly what they’re doing. Tech’s have already had their full first day of working on Wednesday and should really be making progress. So Thursday is a pure working day. If you pull people into the office it tends to be a quiet heads down affair which begs the question, why waste the time pulling them in?
Friday
Friday is the worst on site working day. Unless you are in a sales orientated business or you have weekend work, People are resentful about being pulled in to an office on this day. They are not going to give you their best. I have found that working with teams it is best to merely break a Friday up into two sets of deliverables. See how much actual work you can get done by about 2pm. then between 3pm and 5pm get whatever status updates need sorting done, ready to be sent out to the senior managers, don’t pull people in for this day. However there is one exception… Deep sigh… use it as a consequence, if the team is consistently not delivering, then they come in on a Friday to try and fix it, you will be amazed at the motivation this provides for both junior and senior members
Conclusion
To summarise if I was making the decisions and pulling in on reflection, I would have Tuesday as the definite hybrid working day for all and then additionally Wednesday for PM’s and managers, with Friday as a little used option if the team is having consistent issues hitting goals.
I’ve never really got on well with project managers despite managing projects myself.
And I think it’s down to the sheer diversity of management styles and what people think are the actions of a project manager versus what is genuinely needed to manage a project. However, I suddenly realised that the exact definition of a project manager has been staring me in the face and you will forgive me if this exists already, but it’s only just come to me.
So your project is a car journey, and a project manager is the Co-pilot. They plan the route, They keep a second eye on the petrol gauge. They arrange any changes to the car and book it in for repairs if needed, They ensure the rest of the occupants of the car are doing well, and if necessary they eject a passenger if they can’t behave.
In short they are the person that facilitates keeping the project on the road and going at the right speed in the right direction.
However what the project manager is not:
The Driver: This is the business or information technology, you can show this by the fact that if the project manager is missing, the car journey would still continue. It would eventually get there. It might get lost a few times, It might run out of petrol. It might even stall, and a number of terrible things might happen to it, arriving late and in bad shape. But it will still reach the goal.
The Passenger: They are not the passenger in the back. Their role is not to merely say “Are we there yet?, Are we there yet?” and “Drive faster, Drive faster!”
So as a project manager, if you ever wonder why your requests for status updates are ignored, look at your actions and try and determine if your are a co-pilot on the journey, or just a passenger.
