💃 Same Team! Same Team!🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin made for some unlikely allies in WW2.

Their ability to look beyond their differences and align to a common goal - defeat the Axis Powers - seems seamless in our history classes.

And history has been kind to this relationship 🙂. In reality, Roosevelt was no fan of the British Empire; Churchill was an aristocrat who was pushed to the third-wheel role in the triumvirate; and Stalin was a ruthless and paranoid tyrant who never hesitated to put millions of his people in harms way 🙃.

But these three, as memorialized in history, said and did all the right things to ensure their countries were in total alignment with each other. That they were all-in to defeat Germany and its allies.

There is an incredibly important lesson here for you here 👇

SCENARIO

The Temptation

You’re a Senior Consultant, billing $315/hr to make you client successful. And you’ve missed another sprint deadline because the client’s admin is molasses when it comes to requirements gathering 😩.

When the project leaders see red on the dashboard, they come straight to you to give them a body to string up 😵.

“The team will do better next sprint. We’ll make up the overflow and get back on schedule,” you gently promise, knowing you’ll all be working overtime to make it happen.

“But what was the root cause for the delays? Was it you?” asks the leadership.

“This was a heavy sprint and we made some good progress despite some low velocity at the start,” you respond, dancing around the root cause.

But you know, they know, the admin knows - the admin was the root cause.

You could easily throw them under the bus, make them fall on the sword they brought to the gun fight.

But you don’t, because…👇

ILLUSION OF OPTIONS

It’s a Trap!

Option A - “Adam the Admin is struggling to keep up with the team, and is holding back our productivity. He’s the squeaky wheel.”

Option B - “The team will do better next sprint. We’ll make up the overflow and get back on schedule.”

You may think that Option A absolves you of fault. Actually, it destroys your credibility in the long run. Leadership now sees you as someone who plays politics instead of solving problems. Worse, you haven’t extrapolated this scenario. Here’s what we mean-

If your first reaction is “but the squeaky wheel is the problem. Replace the squeaky wheel!!” then you haven’t steelman’d this all the way through.

If you replace them, then you have to fire them, an administrative nightmare. Then, you need to hire a new resource, which requires approval, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, ramping, etc.

This doesn’t mean you need to live with incompetence, but there’s ways to handle it (this is a whole article in itself 🤔😅) and throwing someone under the bus is not the way 🙅.

THE LONG GAME, ALWAYS

Great Outcomes Don’t Come Easy

Teams that work together, even when things get messy, are rewarded with more business, more influence, and more career growth.

There’s a simple reason: Nobody cares about the messy middle. They care about the successful finish 💯.

I once watched a consultant and an in-house admin clash so hard that leadership had to step in. But by the time go-live came around, they were awkwardly high-fiving like tech nerds do, delivered a successful implementation, and reveled in celebratory happy hour post-go-live 🍻.

But what really hit-

🔥 The client signed a second SOW.
🔥 The in-house admin got promoted.
🔥 We had a new logo and referral.

Boom 💥

No one in leadership cared about the friction during the project, they only cared that it got done successfully.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Salesforce professionals who succeed long-term are the ones who build great relationships, solve problems, and create wins for everyone involved.

You will never regret playing nice. But you will regret burning bridges.

So whether you’re the admin, the consultant, or even the client—remember: we’re all on the same team!

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes