Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren as Steve is out of the office.

Several years ago I was participating in a conference call and I had the rare opportunity to just be a spectator. Two teams from two different organizations were involved. One team had goals and needs; the other team controlled access and resources. Clearly there were two different cultures involved. Neither was what I would consider bad or wrong, just different. Team one (the “askers”) needed to have a variety of changes implemented to meet their goals. Team two (the “enforcers”) was there as the owners of the environment and with it the understanding and control of the change control processes.

The askers were used to lightweight change control with lots of flexibility. Not cowboy changes, just a minimum of bureaucracy. The enforcers had a mature and somewhat heavy change control process that didn’t have much tolerance for casual exceptions. You can imagine how the sparks flew when those two cultures met. The askers had a deadline and needed to get stuff done, and they saw the enforcers as road blocks that were using a process as a reason to delay and defer. The enforcers saw the askers as novices who didn’t get the need for serious change control and weren’t going to have to support the environment once the changes was complete.

That’s all normal from my perspective. We all know the ‘uphill’ side is going to win and it’s just a matter of the askers learning the rules and the people involved. It’s painful, but it’s short term pain (usually!). Conference calls are a really bad mechanism for these early conversations because the teams don’t know each other and without some face to face time to lower the defenses the conversations tend to be direct and unbending.

What caught my attention though was the attitude from the enforcers. It may well have been inadvertent, but it came across as arrogance and/or condescension. Not pleasant and very frustrating if you’re the asker just trying to do what you’ve been asked to do. I thought about it as it played out and what bothered me most was…I think I’ve been that guy at times. Not often, but I know it’s happened. When you’re in your sixth meeting of the day, it’s easy to just say what needs to be said without having the energy to think through how the other side will hear it.

Not long after that call an additional project was launched and the askers became the enforcers and a third team entered the picture as the askers. When the new askers needed to get things done what do you think happened? The enforcers just coldly shut down the askers. No real dialog. Just no. Whether they learned the wrong lesson or just didn’t see that they had become the very thing they railed about, I don’t know.

In fairness I might have caught all the parties involved on a bad day – it happens to all of us. But I think things like this happen quite a bit. It’s the nature of our roles as we specialize and work in silos that other people will need stuff from us and they often won’t know the details and nuances of what we do and how we do it. We can follow our rules and coach them to success, or we can look down on them. Which will we choose to be?