Mistakes I've made (so you don't have to): grinding instead of raising
The project is going…well, okay. Most parts of it seem to be in order; you’re making progress, your team is committing work. But you’re nervous, because there’s one crucial component that’s unfinished and, despite clearly absorbing a ton of effort, hitting one surprise delay after another.
The temptation here is to grind. If it’s your fingers on the keyboard, you’re making tweak after tweak and re-running your test harness, or some equivalent cycle, expecting each iteration to be the one that gives you that relief of being able to tell people that it’s actually working. If you’re waiting to hear just that from a colleague or a direct report, you’re frustrated and underinformed while someone else is doing the grind.
What you’re not doing when you’re grinding is acknowledging that the current approach might not be viable, or at least that the path to being done has proved to have more delays and surprises than planned for.
This is a mistake.
You might get lucky! It happens with some frequency. And if you do get lucky, and everything clears up and your team ships on time, you’ll learn that you can get away with pouring time and effort into doing the same thing until it works.
And that won’t always be true.
When you feel that frustration with feeling like you or your colleague isn’t making progress, it’s time to pause and raise the question of what else you can do instead–now. If you presume that the current line of work on this task is a total dead end, what would you do instead? Is there someone else in your org that’s more familiar with the area of work? Can you either pair with someone directly, or dictate a change of plans with whoever’s doing the implementation work?
This is uncomfortable. It feels like failing, and either admitting lower competence than you’d like to project or potentially bruising the trust of your team. That discomfort is the feeling of growth, not actual failure. This is the path to all of you getting better a what you do–together.
