Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Pleasing everyone

You already know that you can't please everyone, don't you? Are you still trying to do it anyway? If you do then try to stop it asap because it is a useless exercise that will cost you a lot of time, energy and nerves. To be clear, trying to please everyone and getting everyone on the same table to discuss differences are very different things. Let's look at an example for pleasing everyone: As a Project Manager you have to decide who within your team is going to perform a certain task (e.g. meeting with a senior executive for a project review). There are three people that all would like to do this task but you can assign it only to one person. You pick the person that seems to be the best fit for this task. In this case you can't please everyone. You will have to disappoint two people and please one.
To make sure you keep a strong and committed team you, as the Manager, have to try to prevent these occurences or at least to soften the impact of these decisions. Nevertheless these situations will arise from time to time. When they do, accept that you can't please everyone.