Head down, hands by your sides
Sometimes, when faced with a major company change, it’s often the Delivery Manager that a team will turn to for answers. We are, after all, the regular point of contact between a team and the outside world.
This comes with the assumption that we’re all out and out extroverts, happiest when standing in the firing line and asking difficult questions with next to no answers.
Let’s bust that myth.
In a lot of teams, the most senior member of the organisation will be the Lead Developer, Designer or an Architect or two.
Not all Delivery folk are extroverts. I know colleagues who have come through the system as Developers, Testers, Business Analysts and the Armed Forces. They were born into other roles, but they were made in any number of difficult conversation settings. Extroverts, Introverts and a lot in-between.
Where they are extroverts, not all of them take to the mantle of “gob on legs” or the spokesperson for a team of concerned individuals.
In fact, there is only a percentage of us who “throw caution to the wind” or “open our traps when we should stay silent”. It’s to those of you – that man in my mirror – who I write to.
Sometimes, just shut up. Wait for information and answers like the rest of the team/company.
It’s not a good look to always be the person to speak up. To put your head above the parapet; to ask the question everyone else has, but also to receive the answer no one really wants.
As a 49 yo with a dotted career of challenging, speaking up and ultimately, filling dead air with my own P45 – I talk with experience. To the point where, some time ago, I decide it was no longer worth giving voice to the thoughts in my head, just because no one else did. I’m not a Radio DJ, after all.
The change, the answers and the plans/direction will come, irrespective of whether you take to the floor. Give other people their space to shine. Or fail. It’s not on you.
Just sit there, absorb and see what happens.
Which is not something a Delivery Manager likes to do. Or is that just another myth/stereotype?
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