Teamwork on Trial: Why Alignment Feels Impossible
Your Team’s Not Broken - Just Misaligned
This is
- your weekly guide and shortcut to mastering emotional intelligence through the power of empathy. I talked recently about how technical skills alone won’t save you from office politics, but what can.
Across the room, Karen is questioning why something looks the way it does, and Bob is shrugging his shoulders, saying it's what he was told to do.
Alignment - if we could agree, we would have world peace, right? Or at least smoother-running projects.
The art of listening and collaborating is challenging, even when you are all speaking the same language. The same words can mean different things.
"I'm on it."
What does that mean? Am I on it to complete the entire task by the end of the day or the end of the month, or should I do my part that is in my area of expertise?
It can feel impossible to align. But, it is actually possible, when you listen.
The Blame Game: Why Your Team's Falling Apart
A lack of alignment can feel like you are hitting a wall in every direction. But, blame is not always a bad word. Lack of accountability is worse.
I once witnessed a colleague of mine being fired. She was a project manager working on an acquisition project and was blamed for her "bad decision" to acquire the company.
I don't know much about what happened after she departed other than that she lined up a new job within a few months. But there was a last impact on my company. I started on another project, and one of her project manager colleagues was our assigned PM.
His approach? Micro-managing every step. Yes, we were aligned but annoyed. We were annoyed at the constant tabs and reporting every detail of our days to problem-solve.
The issue? There was a culture of fear now due to the lack of accountability. Blaming one person for the entire project's downfall was the wrong approach. This did not happen in a vacuum, either, with just a few members of the leadership team deciding this. The prior project team did not make a collective effort to reflect on what went wrong.
In my current project with the somewhat paranoid PM and the prior one where the PM was fired, we could have used some desperate social awareness, a cornerstone of emotional intelligence. How?
Our roles and responsibilities needed to be better defined.
What our outcomes were and how they would be measured needed to be quantified upfront.
Risks needed to be called out immediately, even if they were unpleasant.
Our project progressed, and we were able to calm the PM collectively by assuring him of what was going on behind the scenes and showing our end results. I understand his paranoia after what happened to his colleague.
Crack the Code: Unlocking Empathy Across Departments
A lack of alignment can have devasting impacts, such as a sense of loss of frustration. If you work in tech, you have experienced this at some point. Alignment is so important that 97% of people say that a lack of it impacts the completion of a project.
I worked on a project where our stakeholders were deeply concerned about their process breaking. Leadership was rightfully concerned that their team would have a disproportionate amount.
Rather than jumping to conclusions with these stakeholders, I took the time to listen. Even though I knew some of their assumptions were incorrect, I stayed silent and listened. I engaged in my relationship management skills and empathy to get a full assessment of the situation and align.
I leveraged phrases such as "I want this to be easier for you and your team" and "I hear you, that could add challenges" to acknowledge. Feeling listened to is often the first step to calming those around you.
The result? We got aligned. By shutting up and listening, my technical colleagues and I were able to resolve some concerns from the team that we had not deeply considered. For the less technical team we were working with, their concerns were assuaged when we realized that some of the gaps we were facing were just miscommunications in phrasing and naming conventions.
We solved the process we were trying to align by addressing the naming gaps and technical gaps. We talked it out in less than two weeks. Success!
Kill the Drama, Build the Team.
Takeaway (emphasizing the key message, idea, or lesson)
I was working on a significant technical implementation with a team of about 20 people. It was a massive and multi-million dollar project with many moving parts. It was such a large project we had several project managers to help manage it.
As expected in any project, certain team members took on more work, and others fell behind. Some did the bare minimum, and others went above and beyond.
Resentment started to build among the go-getters and less attentive team members. There was no alignment on what we were all responsible for.
I witnessed one of our brilliant PMs and emotional intelligence pros do something—take the time to talk with all of the team members and see what was on their minds in a nonjudgmental way. Were people being pulled away for other projects? Were they not feeling they had the right skills to complete the task being asked of them? We felt that their workload was disproportionate.
Once done, this PM initiated an internal meeting, which I participated in, to help reset and realign what we were doing. A little bit of empathy went a long way.
We got to work. The resentment faded our first milestones were getting hit.
The Trial
Teamwork can feel like a trial if you are not aligned. So what do you do?
You work to get aligned.
Alignment can be in managing expectations and workloads or just aligning on the definition of done. Have you ever been on a never-ending project with scope creep? I have. There are nearly endless things you can develop when deploying a technical solution or new product, but that does not mean you should.
Work with your team to set boundaries. If you are not in charge of those who are, Verbalize a document in writing your perspective and concerns.
Align, then move. Moving without aligning will spin you and your team in circles, without a clear end. This will leave you frustrated and your stakeholders pissed.
Leverage your relationship management, a cornerstone of emotional intelligence, to beat this head-on.
✅ What I’ve been Analyzing this week (reading, watching, listening, etc.)
📖 I’m reading The AI Playbook: Mastering the Rare Art of Machine Learning Deployment (Management on the Cutting Edge) by Eric Siegel, and learning about the right way to pursue ML driven projects for success
📺I watched a video on Insta, all about Imposter Syndrome, and how to get past it
✍️ I commented on a post by
about winning the prioritization battle in product vs. engineeringWant more on Empathy and Emotional Intelligence to Elevate your career? 📈
I empower💪tech people to elevate their empathy, to accelerate their careers