Managing Sticky Situations at Work

114 Managing Sticky Situations at Workmight be a Technical. As such, he wants to get the job done as effectivelyas possible while the other Technicals may strive for perfection.Technicals are never satisfied because they search for that magic formulathat spells perfection. It is up to Albert to push them out of stagnation.The makeup of Albert’s teams will make this task either harderor easier. Those people who have high backup styles in either Bold orExpressive will help move the project forward. Being virtual teams,Albert will not have the ability to read verbal cues. He will have todepend on vocal messages. This makes reading the group dynamicseven more challenging.CONDUCTING A VIRTUAL MEETING USING THE SIJR MODELAlbert begins his meeting with his team responsible for the Europeanrollout by stating his desire to stick to the agenda. One of thetop regional managers in the group interrupts, ‘‘We need to pick upwhere we left off last time. We can’t even think about how to initiatethe rollout until we determine what we are going to roll out. It’s beenmy experience that rolling out the entire system at once is suicidal. Weneed to introduce pieces and go from there.’’‘‘Jim, if we introduce pieces, as you suggest, we’ll be introducingchange for the next two years nonstop. I think we should just do itall at once and be done with it, even if it’s more painful. That’s the bestway to introduce change,’’ says Mark.‘‘How are we going to teach people how to use the system?’’ asksAmy.Albert responds. ‘‘That’s already been planned. In fact everything isready to go. Our job is to put together the means to get it out ontothe computers with as little disruption to business as possible. We areonly concerned with the best way to introduce this system to theEuropean offices. Other teams will work on the rollout in the othercompany locations. What I have down for us to do today is come upwith a way to get the software out. How do we let people know aboutthe change and how much downtime will be necessary?’’‘‘Albert, we can’t possibly get this software out in a package peoplewill understand in eight weeks,’’ says Mark.‘‘We’ve already hashed that out. We talked and talked about that lasttime. All we have to do is plan the rollout. Everything else has beendone. Can’t we move forward?’’ asks Natalie. ‘‘I’m sick to death ofconstantly going over the same things.’’