If you’ve ever had a death in the family, a house fire, a medical emergency, or a life-shaking diagnosis for you or someone close to you, you know that these things don’t happen at convenient times. They can also be painful in a way that seems to alter time itself – time can both grind to a halt and move incredibly fast, somehow both at once. These things can also shift priorities – work suddenly becomes a distant second to the personal stakes at hand.
And yet, if you’re on a team working with someone going through something like this, you might have no idea. If somebody suddenly becomes unresponsive, or they miss a deadline, your first response might be one of anger, or disappointment in your colleague, all of which can lead to more trouble down the road. Perhaps you would avoid working with that person in future, or you might even stand in the way of further opportunities for them.
Such a situation came up in a recent group call with a client; using a real-life situation proposed by a manager, I role-played a difficult conversation they needed to have with a colleague who had missed an important deadline that in turn had impacted the manager’s work. I played the role of the colleague, and came back with apologies and some excuses or explanations for why I’d missed the deadline. When the manager used context clues from other real-life conversations they’d had, he realized that the colleague’s spouse had just received a cancer diagnosis and that’s why his work had been impacted. With that, we paused. Everyone in the group understood the gravity, and we took this in for a few moments, but the question lingered – what could have happened differently? After all, as the phrase (often incorrectly attributed to John Lennon) goes, life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans… even during major projects! How can we find ways as a group to support each other when it does, while ensuring the success of the whole team’s work?
A few years ago, we wrote about the value of scheduling time on your calendar for interruptions, since they will happen whether you plan for them or not (a topic we’ll return to in a future article). Similarly, we won’t know the specifics of how life will happen during a major project, but if you’re working with a team on a project lasting more than a few months, you should plan on something happening during that time. So how can you act proactively in a way that is respectful?
This Week’s Tip:
- At the beginning of any major project (involving a team, planned to last two months or more), acknowledge to the group (or acknowledge as a group) that life will happen during the term of the project, and that if at any point someone needs to step away, the group doesn’t need to know the details; only that life is happening. The group will then step in and readjust as necessary, with no more questions asked (and an open understanding that if the affected colleague would like to say more they are welcome to do so). In an ideal world, contingencies or back-ups would be in place to know who would fill in for each person’s role, but depending on the size of the team and the project this may not be something you have the capacity to handle up front.
- Build in buffer time; if you have outside deadlines, build in as much of an inside deadline as you can – a month if possible – to allow time for life to happen. If it does, readjust your deadline at that point. If it doesn’t, great! Now you’re finished early. You can always tweak and iterate during the time you have remaining. Again, this may not always be possible in reality, but you can certainly give yourself some buffer time.
Try these out this week, and let us know how it goes. We’d love to hear from you! We’d also love to know what you’re thankful for!
You can subscribe to our feed here, or sign up for our weekly newsletter to get these articles directly in your inbox.
Building Bridges Leadership 