John Trigg made a post where he talked about project issues such as buy-in. As I started to reply to it to discuss the difficult issue of dealing with people on our laboratory informatics projects, I realized this could fill a book, so I could at least make a separate post for it.
Regardless how many good people and good habits a project has, when there are one or more parties that are allowed to do things such as hijack meetings, it is demoralizing to the ones that are trying to make the project work. Often, though, the ones that keep trying to hijack things are the ones that don’t volunteer for things. So, the ones that volunteer and work hard are sometimes waylaid by those who put their entire effort into throwing a spanner in the works. Over time, this eats away at the project’s effectiveness and the willingness of people to keep working quite so hard and volunteering for things. One part of appreciation of the effort of people is to respect it by not wasting it.
However, I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t listen to the outliers. They’re often the ones that keep the over-enthused from running too far off-track. Listening to people and respecting their opinions is quite different than merely ignoring the ones trying to derail the project.
In a conversation with some users, the other day, we decided that the main reason for this is that most of us tend to ignore the personality issues. We take courses on everything else, but many people I meet in the laboratory informatics world, including the project managers, have a tendency to work on the technology and the project plan, but do not deal with the personality problems that are dealt to them.
Although we talk about “diversity” and about all those personality types like Myers-Briggs, we don’t actually appear to use them. It’s easier to ignore the people problems. Too many people want to be “nice” which doesn’t include straight talk with the ones that appear to be causing problems. It’s just too uncomfortable to do. And so, even though we “celebrate diversity” and claim we love to deal with a variety of people, in the end, we really want everyone on our team to be the same. That way, we don’t have to deal with the differences.
Ah, give me a nice technical problem over a people problem, any day.
