Fly High Engineering typically gets involved into problems where the technical challenges are important. However, the biggest issues often arise from the people, rather than from the technology. In particular, they may come from bad communication, leadership with a hidden agenda, and solutions to false problems. Therefore, these aspects play a fundamental role in all projects, whether technical or not.
Trust comes from communication and leadership
Modern history offers plenty of examples of strong leaders, who could move the masses in some direction, either “left” or “right”. Their followers completely trusted them and, upon their guide, acted in decisive ways, sometimes for the good of everybody, sometimes not. What is the “threshold” for a leader to overcome, to gain such a trust? Which methods allow leaders to gather engaged followers? While it’s difficult to provide general answers to these questions, something can be learned by observing how follower react to leaders adopting different communication styles.
Leaders and followers share communication styles
A given communication style “pairs” leaders and followers, in the sense that a leader adopting that style naturally gathers around people who want to communicate that way. For example, people who want to debate on every detail won’t easily digest commander-like leaders, who just tell them what to do. On the other side people, who just want trusted leaders to tell them what to do, don’t react warmly to someone who wants to engage them into detailed discussions.
Prompt and delayed actions are generated by simple and detailed communication, respectively
In recent times we had examples of very “vocal” political leaders, very effective in moving masses. They go straight on every problem, imposing their view and telling people what to do. Apparently, their followers are keen to act promptly upon these calls. On the contrary, their opponents seem to be less effective because they “lose time” in articulating more detailed positions, because this is what their followers expect them to do. Consequently, when the first have executive power they produce several prompt actions, while the others proceed more cautiously.
Prompt and delayed actions may eventually lead to the same future
In practice, one leadership style leads to prompt actions that have a chance to solve urgent problems, while the other naturally produces a lower throughput of actions, almost preventing prompt reactions to urgent issues. Actually, as the human capacity to predict the is quite little future (if any), neither of the two processes ensures that the taken decisions will bring any improvement. Very often, in practice the first approach produces a series of sharp changes that, when considered in perspective, may look quite noisy; the other approach produces less apparent variability, but this is because it makes less actions per unit time. External and internal constraints often induce a long-term “drift” that is essentially the same, even when left and right governments alternate. This is simply because some changes are unavoidable for a society to survive in the changing environment. Some changes are however so rapid to make a natural selection on the communication style.
Acting carefully won’t bring you out of a fire
If the majority of people perceive a problem as particularly critical and urgent, only the direct and perhaps simplistic communication style of commander-style leaders has a chance to find a suitable solution. Perhaps we are in times where this is the case, as it is suggested by the increasing polarisation of the public discussions. “Polarisation” simply means that people want to be told whether they should choose white or black and expect prompt actions, rather than detailed discussions with which they can certainly understand better the situation, unfortunately too late for the solution to be perceived as effective. Therefore, people prefer betting on head or tails, hoping to get at least 50% probability of success. Sadly, often this means only one thing: 100% probability of failure. We all know about this. Simply, we don’t like being told about it.
The leader’s agenda
If we cannot predict the future and the long-term trend depends only in a minor way on the political side of the leaders, why do we need leaders at all? And how can such people gain so much success and followers?
Leaders are necessary
Leaders are always welcome because, once accepted as guidance, they let us save mental energy by telling us what to do. This is an instinctive attitude that we all have, and many other living beings share with us too. I can’t see a world without leaders, unless something else — an all-mighty AI? — tells us what is best for ourselves. Therefore, let’s address the other question. The answer is that leaders become effective when their agenda is promoted in such a way that their followers see some advantage for themselves.
Communication is driven by the leader’s agenda and by the followers’ interests
Thanks to crafted communication and by leveraging on the needs of the followers, leaders get more and more influential. In practice, it may (and it does) happen that leaders don’t solve the followers’ problems, but nevertheless advance in their career and bring forward their own agenda. The latter is very often hidden to the followers, who only care about their own issues. They are happy about the promises they hear from the leader and are ready to excuse her/him for failing to address their problems, because (1) their leader shows — but perhaps does not sincerely possess — sincere interest and attention to them, and because (2) their leader admits that she/he, as everybody else, could not be able to predict what actually happened and still promises to continue striving to provide a good future for the followers.
Influence and power may go along or may not
Note that the influence of leaders may be paralleled by their effective power on the followers, as it is the case for the management in an organisation, or may not, as it is the case for the opinion leaders in the same organisation, who can influence the decisions of their managers. Therefore, real-life situations may be quite tricky to understand, also because there are several leaders acting at the same time, whose agendas partially overlap, despite their attempts to look different. The main difference is that influencers who don’t have a powerful role in the organisation need to gain a lot more followers’ support to become effective, compared to those sitting already in a powerful position.
The solution must be compatible both with the leader’s agenda and with the followers’ needs
Many projects failed because different stakeholders were pursuing incompatible objectives. The only way to prevent failure is to realize what is the root cause, often the most difficult step, and then act to solve or mitigate the backstage issues that have been uncovered. This is by far not an easy task, as difficult decisions have to be taken.
Three steps to rescue the project
- Understand the motivations of all stakeholders. They won’t tell you about their hidden agenda! Therefore, this takes quite some amount of inference and emotional intelligence, supported by the capability of finding information and hints that suggest what they don’t want to tell you.
People don’t like change, not even when it’s for the better
Don’t forget this simple but very important thing! We don’t like changing our habits. Therefore, we oppose resistance even to changes that aim at simplifying our life. Moreover, if the changes are imposed by others, we oppose by default even before thinking about pros and cons. Overcoming the resistance to change is often difficult and may mine the success of what we are doing. The only possibility to mitigate the problem is to (1) analyse all the relevant aspects since the beginning, and (2) involve as many stakeholders as possible in the formulation of the plan. Although change is always difficult, we have more chance to make it if it comes from our own decision.
Summary
Often the biggest difficulties in any project arise when the identified solution is not compatible with the interests and needs of all stakeholders. Moreover, the resistance to change adds further obstacles for the success of the project. The project success is much more probable if we can perform good identification of influencers, power-gamers, followers, and understand their needs and, if possible, goals. No matter if they tell you that the problem is technical, there is always a human side that deserves attention and due consideration. Solving the technical problem and leaving people unhappy is a failure, not a success. Therefore, you’ll have to become one of the leaders, pay attention to your communication style and adapt it to different stakeholders. Find a solution that brings benefits to all (or to most of them) and make sure they understand the expected benefits, even before starting to do any technical work!