When you are leading from behind it can be difficult to be respectful.
Once upon a time, I lost a little respect for my leaders and teammates, but that is no excuse for being a little disrespectful.

Here is my takeaway #12 from one of the most useful practical books in my field, “Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager”:

12) “When it’s crunch time, when things get crazy and it’s harder to demonstrate respect, become more respectful, not less” … “demonstrate this respect by anticipating problems and meeting the team’s needs. The more respected team members feel, even when having a tough conversation, the more engaged they will be.”

Note: This comes from Chapter 2 “PEOPLE + PROCESS = SUCCESS” (page 24)

* Demonstrate respect

Real life is messy. Projects never go as planned, especially if they are not planned to begin with. Mistakes get repeated until the real problem (The Root Cause) is understood and eliminated (or at least mitigated). Lessons Learned when “projects” were not properly initiated, planned, executed, monitored and controlled, and closed out (The 5 Process Groups) are tough lessons for everyone involved. It’s the school of hard knocks!

Story time: I experienced many production releases (good and bad) as a team member/pseudo-leader (aka – “unofficial” project manager) in an organization that didn’t have formal project management. As a result, we didn’t have good coordination between positions in silos with clear points of contact at clear intervals. We didn’t have clean hand-offs providing adequate status for developing information.

In other words, it was a functional position expected to be a full-time informal project management position simultaneously. I imagine most of you reading this have experienced something similar. My position was expected to make up the difference where we lacked in teamwork, collaboration, coordination, and communication by itself, by asking the right questions at the right time (whatever that means) of subject experts in the middle of whatever they were doing. That did not always work out well when juggling 100s of workflow items moving about the department. In fact, we never had a perfect release.

Since I was coming back from 3 weeks of vacation, in one instance, I did not want to be held accountable yet again, for the failings of a messed-up process at the tail end of the work, on a “project” I was not part of for most of the duration of the work performed.

My attempts at cleaning up the problems that occurred in the process ahead of me didn’t go well. As per usual, we were extending after hours on this new release deadline (already 2 business days behind the original due date), I felt rushed and unfortunately things got unavoidably sloppy in the time crunch. When being held accountable for failings that compounded and that I contributed to in the “final hour”, I did not take it well.

In those moments, we need to focus on process, not on what people did wrong, per say. But on this occasion, I pointed blame at others and them at me. I regret that! And I’m sure I lost a lot of respect as a result.

We should have enough emotional intelligence to behave like professionals regardless of the circumstances, how much respect we feel towards others, whether or not we feel respected in the moment or in general, and whether or not we believe these tough conversations will ultimately change future processes, expectations, and results for the better.