Getting stuck on projects: What happens when we get stuck, and how do we come together to solve?
I like things done a certain way. Call me type A. Call me controlling. I remember group assignments in middle school being a nightmare. I was the kid who would do the entire thing by myself, thank you very much. I didn’t want to miss any of the information or get a lower grade. Now looking back I would say: I didn’t trust my classmates.
Flash forward 20 years. I will never forget the project when I realized that, if my team had divided the work between us, we all would have worked 4 hours versus me working over a weekend for 16 hours. I saw that my need to control and do it all was no longer serving me. My team was more talented and more efficient than I was. Looking back I would say: I recognized I wanted to trust my team. But I still didn’t.
For years, I held the company back from growing for fear that, if one of my teammates dropped the ball, missed a deadline, quit, it was on me to pick it up and finish the project. If we grew past my ability, then HUB would fail. I would fail. My team reassured me that we could do this--and do it really well. And they were right.
We began to do more projects in new areas outside my comfort zone. Outside my realm of feeling superhuman. This sparked a new kind of fear--a fear mixed with reverence for other people’s brilliance. Would they still need me? Do I still have value? After all, THEY are amazing!!! I can’t do what they are doing!
I can’t and don’t want to do what the incredible members of my team do. We all have core strengths, and I have my own seat on this bus. And when I started stating my weaknesses, not being able to heavy lift design anymore, not seeing the way to the finish line, not feeling confident when facilitating a group activity, and identifying other people’s strengths of being strategic, being excellent writers, being amazing researchers, the team started to do the same. We identified what was easy and enjoyable and where people wanted to push and grow.
When we got too busy and forgot to check-in, we all felt like we were working on our own lonely islands. We instituted daily team meetings--with the singular goal of connecting as humans. When one of the team is overwhelmed, overworked, or has hit the wall, we come together as a team to find a solution. With that connection came more trust.
There was a time when, without a conversation, I would yank a project from a designer and put them on something else in the name of the deadline. I didn’t have the courage to say: I see you struggling--how can I support you in solving this and meeting the deadline? No one taught me this as a child, and I couldn’t offer it as an adult. Until I did the hard work to learn the skill.