Today was quite an emotionally draining day off the back of what would have been a great meeting. Content and direction-wise, there wasn't any thing major that needed addressing and the work was pretty much 75% the way there. However, sometimes when targeted, the 25% can be the most painful to work on especially when the comments about the work feels somewhat invalidating of the hard work that you've put in so far.
Factually, the discussion went about like so:
My colleague and I were working on a document that highlights the constraints we face in the region when we want to create a better digital experience on the web. My colleague dived into the details while I will provide the wrapper and context around how best to present this data to the leadership.
What started out as a web constraints document for just the global web team, quickly became a document for senior leadership and we had to quickly pivot the narrative. As I was the most experienced on the team to do that, I took ownership of narrative-crafting while my colleague worked on the evidence.
The work was done well into the night at the 11th hour (quite literally until 11pm the previous day) and while hardwork doesn't necessarily equate to quality and performance, I was quite chuffed about what was on the report and how I manage to highlight how APAC couldn't align to the global corporate strategy because of the difficulties we face. At the back of my mind, these issues have been raised on a few occasions and there's nothing new that senior leaders didn't already know.
So when my boss asked what is the aim of this document, who should receive it and what do we hope to achieve at the end of it, I answered with the idea that the senior leadership needs to know the challenges we're facing and how they don't align to the corporate strategy that she has laid out because of the multitude of technical challenges.
I was caught by surprise when the approach that my boss wanted, was to frame "challenges" as "opportunities" and potentially change the narrative on its head and he felt that my language was too strongly worded.
For example,
Global shared web strategy | APAC’s challenge |
Connects us and our work to build web experiences that align to portfolio and corporate strategies | APAC cannot connect to portfolio and corporate strategies because there is no international web strategy that brings regions to parity in terms of language, depth of content and user experience. |
Reverses legacy trends that contribute to sprawl and waste | Our CMS, website system and sprawl of content is making regions harder to catch up and localise, creating dead-ends and tech debt which disrupts the user experience. |
While factual, I've been asked to rephrase the narrative to ensure that people won't be put on the defensive and that they're failing (verbatim from my boss). I am perfectly fine to phrase things in a politically sensitive way, and I've tried my best to already par down and not make the document into a "rant". The feedback was basically to not have us potentially land in minefields with other stakeholders that might cut us from working with them in the future.
I don't disagree with my boss and I think a lot of these could have been avoided if he told us from the start how he wanted to position the team in front of leadership from the get-go, rather than tell us post-production and then have us rectify the work.
What affected me most
The biggest thing that made me extremely sore, was when he went on to espouse that in his learnings with senior leadership is to continually build relationships and not burn bridges because we all ultimately have to work together. This was made in reference to how we shouldn't show people up and put them on the backfoot.
The first thought that came to my mind was: "isn't that what we all set out to do? Who starts their career thinking about burning bridges?" and immediately, the following thought popped into my mind, "are you suggesting that I've been on a war path and burning bridges for the sake of pushing APAC's agenda?"
I've always seen myself as a champion of my region and to promote APAC's interests to a NA audience is not always the easiest and in fact, I go out of my way to explain why and how things are sometimes culturally different. However, a bridge must be built from both ends and it's extremely difficult to meet in the middle when the person doesn't want to even start laying bricks from their end, or that they don't think that bridge is worthwhile building to begin with.
While we don't expect everyone to become chummy with us, but it's affecting me emotionally to be told that we need to build bridges and ultimately it contradicts my experience on the ground. On one hand, it's easy to say we need to build relationships. I'd admit that I took it personally because it feels disappointing to be reminded again that you're "not good enough" and perhaps that was not the intention, but it did felt like I didn't do enough to build these bridges with the global corporate team.
Perhaps what I'd need to do first, is to have that clarity that my boss didn't mean to say that I haven't been building bridges. I think the trigger is less about the work, but about the comment that my efforts haven't been recognised. I've tried to make connections wherever I am, but not everyone is forthcoming and there's a limit to what I can do with so many hours a day. Furthermore, not all of us have gone through the learnings/training that he had, and it's hard to connect downwards beyond the lessons when in reality, the rest of us are just trying to get work done. Fundamental customer experiences such as just being able to add a language filter is denied to us because global priorities have overtaken regional requests.
Of course not every request is important, but if after 3 years of saying the same things, it can feel like we're writing this report for the sake of it and going through the motions again year after year with no concrete plans/outcomes. It can also feel invalidating when people may not think your ideas are important enough and you start to question if you're in the right job to begin with. Even when you show up good examples of how a site should be from bigger players such as Microsoft and Adobe, you're not given due recognition for trying to tell people that the way we're doing things is no longer sustainable.
These all feel extremely disappointing and de-energizing. There may be meetings, but is it really listening when there's no follow up action?
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