Predictable Pitfalls, Paths to Partnership
(Originally published by TDWI) By Maureen Clarry
(This article is available for download, as a PDF document.)
One word that dominates discussions about business intelligence and data warehousing these days is “partnership.” Go to any TDWI conference or seminar and you’ll surely hear conversations revolving around this seemingly simple concept. Yet, so many organizations still endure significant difficulty in building lasting partnerships. Why?
To understand what’s happening, let’s begin with a definition of partnership. If you’ve focused on trying to employ new tactics or strategies at your company to build or strengthen partnerships, you’ve likely engaged in lengthy discussions about the concept. But have you laid out an official definition for what partnership means? While this step might sound obvious or trite, a brief but serious exploration of what partnership means can be quite valuable in making sure everyone is on the same page.
Definition of partnership: a relationship in which we are jointly committed to the success of a particular process or goal.
The operative word is “committed.” A commitment is a binding agreement, but it is intangible, an abstraction. As such, a commitment can be difficult to maintain, especially during the harried day-to-day activities of any company or organization. When “stuff” happens on the job, attention can quickly be diverted, often resulting in commitments being set aside.
Stuff Happens
Everyone knows that stuff happens. Nary a day goes by in the working world without some
curveball being thrown somewhere. While the
variety of stuff that happens on any given day is virtually infinite, there are many common occurrences that are easily recognizable: You offer a great idea, but nobody responds positively. You make a simple request, but only get a wishy-washy response. You reach out to invite cooperation, but get resistance instead. You do something nice, but in lieu of gratitude, you get anger.
What happens next is where the trouble really starts. Too often, when something unexpected occurs, people default to making up a story in their head to explain the occurrence. Almost invariably, the story made up is one in which the story’s creator is the protagonist, while the person who acted undesirably becomes the unwitting antagonist. The most prevalent reason why this happens is because people take such incidents personally. They evaluate others as mean, insensitive or incompetent, then react by getting mad, vowing to get even, or simply withdrawing.
In reality, very few developments in a work environment are intended as personal affronts. This fact does little to deter the story-making process, however. And whenever stories are being imagined, work isn’t getting done. Not only is work not getting done, but rifts actually widen because of such miscommunications – or non-communications, as we might call them. The end result: commitments go by the wayside.
Predictable Conditions / Predictable Responses
How people perceive day-to-day happenings in a work environment depends greatly on what
position they hold. In a new class at TDWI this past August, we conducted an exercise in which we divided the class of 60-some people into four groups: Tops for senior management; Middles for middle management, such as project managers; Bottoms for database administrators, coordinators, and assistants; and Customers for end users or external clients. We then issued marching orders and everyone started “working” on a variety of faux projects.
The results were predictable. As we’ve found in our studies of corporate culture, and as we saw in the exercise, the general attitudes of Tops, Middles, Bottoms and Customers tend to gravitate along certain lines. Tops become overloaded with the amount of work and decision-making they must do. Bottoms feel disregarded by their superiors. Middles find themselves torn between superiors and subordinates. Customers feel neglected.
Just as those conditions remain standard, so do the consequent responses. Tops tend to suck up responsibility whenever new issues arise, thus resulting in work overload. Bottoms hold “them” responsible for the unpleasant situation in which they find themselves, often blaming management for past failures or confusing directives. Middles let themselves get caught in between Tops and Bottoms, thus losing their own identity and agenda to those above and below them. Customers default to holding “it” – namely, the contractor and/or IT department – responsible for not delivering what they want.
These predictable conditions and responses are so common that they’ve become ingrained in most corporate professionals. Whether this reality is due to human nature, conditioning, or a combination of both is irrelevant. The fact remains that people do tend to act in such ways. And, because these behaviors have become second nature, that means people don’t even realize that they’re doing what they’re doing. That means they don’t see their responses as choices or decisions, but simply reactions; just as they might react by ducking if something comes flying at them.
Take a Stand
Although predictability isn’t usually ideal for creative work, the good news is that it’s very useful for business intelligence and data warehousing projects. Once patterns of behavior are recognized, the path to productive partnership becomes much more clear.
In our new TDWI class, we explain the importance of taking a stand in order to achieve successful partnerships. The analogy we use involves two doors, Door A and Door B. Door A takes us to the usual places: if we’re tops, we suck up responsibility; if we’re bottoms, we blame the tops; if we’re middles, we get caught in the middle and torn; if we’re customers, we blame the delivery system for not delivering. In other words, Door A is the pitfall of standard reactions.
Door B is another story entirely. In order to go through Door B, you must take a stand. You must make a commitment not to take the easy route of going through Door A. Going through Door B is therefore much more difficult because it demands that you remain committed to your partnership, even if that means more work or hard decisions.
Here are some high-level stands that apply to each of the four groups in our class, groups that map to virtually every corporate professional in the business intelligence and data warehousing world: Tops: Be a top who creates responsibility throughout the organization; Bottoms: be a bottom who is responsible for his/her condition in the system, and for the overall condition of the system itself; Customers: Be a proactive customer who gets in the middle of delivery processes and helps them come to fruition; Middles: be a middle who stays out of the middle, who maintains independence of thought and action.
While these stands are not catch-all answers, they do provide a baseline of understanding from which to act. Circumstances will always vary, but if you and your team remain committed to your partnerships, the sky will be your limit.
Maureen Clarry has more than 25 years of experience in business, software development, project management, facilitation, and organizational leadership. She is Co-Founder of CONNECT: The Knowledge Network, specializing in building DW teams since 1992.