Here’s another situation I was in recently. I was lucky to be working as a consultant for a mature organization that was very careful in selecting its staff. Pretty much all the stakeholders were very professional at their roles, and most of them were nice personalities as well. What a great environment for a project manager! You just contact the right people at the right time, and there they are, nice to speak with, offering their very professional opinion, saving you time on unnecessary micromanagement. I got so used to it that I almost forgot that in some cases, people can exercise very different approaches when it comes to communication with project managers.
So, this is what happened: our core product went through an update that caused some operational challenges – we needed a change request to update a script. The change was quite urgent, since after certain amount of days, the product change could have a significant operational impact. I contacted the person at a corresponding department. Unfortunately, she was out of the office. Then I reached out to her replacement (say her name was Julia). Julia and I had never met nor spoken, even over the phone. I sent Julia an email, described the situation, offered my assistance if additional details would be required. Julia was supposed to initiate a request and it would get dispatched to our technical team.
Well, in the pre-pandemic world, I would simply pass by Julia’s desk and have a nice chat with her, but in our new virtual reality both Julia and I were working remotely.
A day passed –no response from Julia. I contacted the technical team to see if they received the change request – they got nothing. I sent a follow-up email. No response. I asked Julia’s team member to remind her of my request. She did. No response. I sent Julia a Skype message – no response…not even acknowledgement that she is looking into my request.
Now here comes the tension… when you see that someone in the office (the green Skype indicator tells me that) keeps ignoring your multiple messages, you start to think that they have something against you or against your requests…
What is the right course of action?
Say, I find out Julia’s phone and call her - what if she has already been irritated with my messages? Some people work at their own pace, so three messages in 2 days could be reasonable for me in this situation, but too much for her. After all, I want to solve the issue, not to create unnecessary conflict.
Should I call her boss to see if someone else can do the job? Well, this would clearly be an escalation, and while chances are that the work will be done, Julia will certainly feel negatively following that.
After some thought, I decided to call Julia.
“Good morning Julia (she does not expect my call, so I have a few seconds to set the right tone for the conversation). I know you have received multiple emails from me (taking away this potential argument by acknowledging it) and I am sorry for bothering you again (I am being friendly and polite), but we need your change request in order to be able to address the issue on time (I am sharing the time pressure with her – the job is actually on us, all we need is her approval).”
She responds “Oh, I am sorry, I just came back from a personal leave. Still catching up on my emails”. My turn to react by steering the conversation in a positive direction: “Oh, I can imagine how busy you are today. Sorry once again that I have to bug you”. (I am demonstrating compassion, yet waiting for her to offer a resolution.) “I know this is typically not your job, but since you are covering for Sara, I am reaching out to you. If you need more details, we will be happy to assist.” – Once again, I am offering my cooperation.
Then she says: “You know, let me look through the email thread and get back to you. Would you like me to call or email you?” I said “I am fine either way”.
Did she respond right away? In this case she did, but regardless, I knew that the tension was not there anymore, so I could easily follow-up on my request should I have to do so.
And then… the resource who was supposed to do the work unexpectedly left for a one week vacation without giving anyone a backup name… but that is a whole different story😊.