Turn right at the hot dog stand…

I was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a col­league recently where we were dis­cuss­ing dir­ec­tions from an air­port arrivals gate to the city shuttle bus, which, in a little detail was to turn right at the hot dog stand then left a few meters later, exit through the glass doors and look for the shuttle bus.  It was only half way through the dis­cus­sion where my col­league stopped and poin­ted out that we were hav­ing a seem­ingly nor­mal, cas­ual con­ver­sa­tion about loc­a­tions we were both famil­iar with which were on the other side of the world, talk­ing about them as though they were right out­side in the street.

This real­isa­tion, that we were treat­ing such dis­tant loc­a­tions so cas­u­ally caused us both to remark that this was a con­ver­sa­tion we could not ima­gine any pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion of our fam­il­ies ever hav­ing, to cas­u­ally talk about the best way to get from an air­port 14,000km away from our home office to the city centre and from there to the hotel.

It is at times like this, when the real­ity of the world we live in sud­denly strikes me and I real­ise that I really am liv­ing and work­ing in a world, and in an industry where these things are taken for gran­ted; we can cas­u­ally dis­cuss phys­ical routes between geo­graphic loc­a­tions yet we so less fre­quently pause to dis­cuss the best way to nego­ti­ate rela­tion­ships with our co work­ers in these dis­tant and often mys­ter­i­ous loc­a­tions.  We can talk about costs or sched­ule but not the desires and motiv­a­tions of the team of people work­ing with us at the other end of the tele­phone line.  Is this abil­ity to dis­cuss the phys­ical world and the world of num­bers and dates easier than the human char­ac­ter­ist­ics simply because we can see and relate to the build­ings and roads, spread­sheets and gantt charts but not see or under­stand the thoughts and emo­tions of the indi­vidu­als or is it because we don’t even want to try.

When was the last time any of us work­ing in vir­tual team pro­jects sched­uled a reg­u­lar period of time to reflect on and to dis­cuss the work­ing rela­tion­ship between col­leagues in dis­tant offices, when, that is other than when there are prob­lems in our pro­ject and we are look­ing for someone or some­thing to blame.  We will hap­pily devote an hour a week to a review of budgets, a sched­ule review or a tech­nical team meet­ing but we so rarely make time to dis­cuss the inter­per­sonal rela­tion­ships in our teams.  We all talk at length about how all pro­jects are team efforts and that the strength of the team is vital to the suc­cess­ful out­come of the pro­ject yet do we really work at main­tain­ing that team in the same way as we do main­tain­ing a budget or a sched­ule.  I have seen pro­jects where the pro­ject man­ager will visit an office for a review, spend a day in the review meet­ings and then depart for the air­port without even speak­ing to most of the per­son­nel work­ing there, the data takes pre­ced­ent over the people, yet there should be more of a balance.

So, my chal­lenge to us all is then this; the next time you are look­ing at your weekly pro­ject man­age­ment meet­ing cal­en­dar, take a few moments to con­sider how much of your week is devoted to main­tain­ing the rela­tion­ships in your team and is it in pro­por­tion to the amount of time you spend on the tech­nical side of man­aging your pro­ject, after all, it is easy to turn right at the hot dog stand but how often do you notice the per­son work­ing there…

Copy­right secured by Digiprove © 2011 Francis Norman

Related Posts:

• Do you need a com­mu­nic­a­tions coach?
• Tips for sur­vival in the deep end of inter­na­tional pro­ject communications
• Man­aging mar­gin­al­isa­tion in vir­tual teams

Tagged as: interpersonal skills, virtual teams