The number one reason I wanted a “platform” at all with respect to project management work was to start talking, regularly and in-depth, about boundaries work being at the very heart of enjoying a satisfied, balanced career as a project manager. (I suspect this is true of other occupations as well, but the throughline of my own career is project management so I can’t speak to others.)
Yesterday, I read an Atlantic article entitled This Is What Happens When There Are Too Many Meetings, which I clicked on because I was taking a breather between 5 hours of meetings. Do you ever accidentally see yourself in an article critiquing the current state of work? #MONOCLEEMOJI
Derek Thompson uses the word “leaky” to describe the phenomenon of never being truly at work or at home, which I think is brilliantly employed in passages like this:
“At home, work is especially leaky: Leisure bleeds into labor (reading TMZ during a Zoom meeting) and work seeps into leisure (answering emails at the dinner table).”
Derek Thompson writing for The Atlantic
He also wrote a sentence that basically reached out of my monitor to punch me in the face because of how true it is of project management work, especially when you are managing lots of stakeholders: “Today, most knowledge work is basically just communication, which makes it indistinguishable from a lot of leisure.”
Okay ouch. Literally yesterday, I was on the phone with a stakeholder for almost an hour. By the end, 1) we had not talked about the project almost at all, and 2) they kept saying how much “better they felt” about the project. Maybe we should call this the “Is this billable time?” problem: the problem of keeping stakeholders happy through human relationships when what they’re paying a project manager for is ostensibly to move the work forward. Which leads to a much larger (maybe the) question: in a “knowledge economy”, what constitutes work?
What unmet needs are being met?
As project managers (or, really, anyone getting paid to do work, I suppose) our job is to respond to unmet needs by meeting them. In theory, this means we get paid to draft project plans, maintain a crystal clear understanding of progress and value being added, update stakeholders, disseminate results, and maintain organizational process assets. In practice, unmet needs often stem from human quirks, not from a lack of effective process.
For example, I meet with one stakeholder on a biweekly basis that I think genuinely just needs to hear my voice. I can (do) send all the dashboards, weekly updates, etc that our process dictates… and in his head, he’s fine. He knows I’ve got it. He knows that if there were an issue, I’d flag it… and that if I’m not flagging it, we’re on-time and on-budget. But I’ve noticed since we’ve begun working together that for his heart to get it, he needs to hear it. And whether I like it or not, his heart is evaluating my progress. Later on, his heart will remember how he felt while I was managing his work. And if his heart remembers feeling nervous, or like he wasn’t certain I had things under control, then this matters to me. Or it should.
So I call him. On the phone. Every week. We don’t even talk through the reports every time. I just think it helps him to hear me sounding friendly and confident — it’s almost like my tone corroborates all the green status OK boxes.
Dancing a fine line
This — applying emotional intelligence concepts to a heady field — is where boundaries work comes in. There is a very fine line between anticipating someone’s unmet needs and taking responsibility for them.
As I mentioned in a previous post, project management is a team sport and emotional intelligence is key. That said… I’ve noticed that there are times that I actually over-rely on emotional intelligence (I think it is StrengthsQuest folks that say that a strength, overutilized, is a weakness?) to my own detriment. For me this is where boundaries work has to come in if I want to avoid burnout.
I have also noticed that I can get myself into trouble when I start doing this anticipating work implicitly. Nedra Tawwab’s excellent Set Boundaries, Find Peace points out that “relationships take work, but that they don’t have to be hard or challenging”. For me, relationships feel hard when:
- I perceive them to be unbalanced… which often coincides with the times I’m operating under unspoken assumptions about what another person “needs”. Unchallenged narratives for me here look like “I ALWAYS DO THIS AND IT KEEPS THE TEAM TOGETHER AND NO ONE APPRECIATES IT”. Challenging those narratives looks like me remembering to ask myself: why am I doing this? Am I sure that this is actually helpful? If so, does the other person know I’m taking time to complete it?
- I am afraid of the other person challenging my self-image – an unhelpful piece of mine is that I need to be competent and likeable, so I tend to struggle more with clients where I’m often pushing back. I am working on this. Challenging this for me looks like reminding myself before I say something “push-back”-y that this is how I add value to a team.
In both cases, I’m anticipating needs and setting them in stone without validating the assumption (bad), and then acting on it (worse). I would never do this for tangible work… but to circle back up to Derek Thompson’s article above, more and more of my work involves communicating skillfully, and I’m realizing that boundaries work is the work that lies ahead for me as I continue to develop this skill.
I’m going to close with what (for me) has been the money paragraph: I spent a decade in a service-based field as a woman before pivoting into project management, and I’m learning that much of what I thought was emotional intelligence was actually emotional labor that is now getting in the way of me setting boundaries as a knowledge worker.
Thanks for reading. If this resonates, I hope it has been helpful to see it reflected in someone else. And take heart – I’m looking forward to spending much more time examining facets of this conversation, and I hope we can undertake it together.
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