Angry Executive
Tomorrow is often the busiest time of year. — Danish Proverb
Making people happy is over rated. Making everyone happy is impossible. Getting the job done, no matter how difficult, is enormously under rated.
Time is the most limited resource any manager or executive has. The higher up in the food chain, the more precious the minutes. How you parcel out the minutes is critically important to the success of the role. How you divide these minutes will what gets movement and what doesn’t. The same can be said for your department as you personally have a fixed set of time and effort to allocate to your tasks.
There is a finite limit to the amount of work addressed in a given time period. Simple math indicates that prioritization and selecting the right things to work on, at all times, is critical. If you are wise, this will be a collective prioritization not an individual one. Regardless of how you prioritize, it is critical it is to set expectations with every one involved as to where each persons requests fit into the sequence.
People will be upset. Everyone will differ in their expectations as to what is important and why their requests are more important than anyone elses. Life is full of compromises. It is all too common however that IT customers expect that the only ones to compromise are IT and figure out how to service all the demands at once. After all, as the indoctrination goes IT is a “service organization” and service organizations exist only to serve.
It is rare that a true partnership exists where business and IT are true equals. I have been fortunate enough to see where this partnership works well. It is surprising how much more work can get accomplished in this environment. I have also seen the other extreme where there is not a partnership and the IT organization is subservient to the business partners. This inevitably leads to dissatisfaction within the IT organization and a productivity hit ensues. Is there a little of “chicken and egg” going on? Maybe.
Net-net, difficult decisions will always be made about how to marshall scarce resources to get a number of broad initiatives completed. At the more strategic level of the organization many of the executive peers will not have their initiatives ranked as high as they would like and therefore not funded. There will unhappy executives. Maybe many. With luck they will be unhappy for all the right reasons. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if they are happy. It matters that you get the job done, regardless of the difficulty.
As a colleague astutely pointed out, “if half of all the people an executive works with are not mad at them, they’re not doing their job.”
