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In today’s corporate world there is hardly a day without escalation, true to say! Market and customer demands drive us towards crazy deadlines and competition that the stakeholders involved don’t spend time to plan the deliverables and agree on well established outcomes. It also happens that even when the deliverables and outcomes are well defined, we can run into trouble when faced with external factors that can affect the winning spirit of the team and derail the project/program/idea that we are working on.
Of course, there are well established management frameworks that would cover the aspects People, Process, Technology that can ensure we strike the right balance and address any unforeseen risks and techno-socio-environmental changes that might happen in short/long term. However, the key to successful handling of escalations is not just reacting to it rather be proactive and anticipate such escalations.
Anticipation is driven by a mix of experience and intuition. Experience is when given a set of Input parameters that we need to work with and expected results that we need to meet what is the best course of action that would work. This comes with being familiarized in facing such scenarios before. Even though 60% of all aspects can be anticipated by experience the remaining 40% would be based on pure intuition.
For example, when the team is working on any key assignments look out for feelers from your team members or stakeholders around you that can indicate if the desired results are on the right track or not! Most of the times these feelers are nonverbal, implicit, non-data driven indicators that must trigger a feeling that does not inspire confidence in the situation around you.
When you are faking it, you know you’re faking. It doesn’t motivate you. There’s a shallowness in that. So, you should not have that. You don’t feel wholesome. So, you need to learn to address such feelers and get to the root of the problem. This you can develop when you are Grounding yourself appropriately. Grounding develops when you take personal time off to understand and look inside you to find answers. There is so much data and information around you that by simply doing (a+b)^2 = a^2+b^2+2ab is not going to solve the problem. You need to think exponentially and Out of the box to identify and act on any signals that might sink the ship you are on!
Also start having a healthy respect for fear. Because fear has got… So long as it is not paralyzing, it has got a purpose it can deliver. It will keep you probably on your feet, more agile. it’ll keep you sharper. So, make it a habit to watch out and anticipate things that might go wrong! So, to re-articulate we could say that being watchful of fear and looking inside will make you a better person or a better professional. And when confronted with fear or wrong feelers, it’s important to not lose your grounding and centeredness and not get paralyzed and to go through it with a tenacity.
Good Luck with escalations! 😊
