More Problems Can Be a Sign of Success

A few weeks ago, I wrote about what to do if you’re overwhelmed by too many problems to solve in your project management role, and I showed you why many types of problems don’t actually need to be solved, or not yet.

In this blog, I’d like to show you an additional “answer” to feelings of overwhelm from too many problems, and it’s this: if it seems like more and more problems are finding their way to your desk, that might be because you’re doing a great job.

I don’t just mean “people are coming to you because you’re a great problem solver.” This may be the case, but you need to make sure you’re not becoming a magnet for problems that are really best solved by someone else.

Instead, I mean that because you’re leading projects or implementing processes so successfully, this may be the very reason people are now able to recognize a lot of areas where things could be just a little bit better.

I am borrowing this idea from a coworker, so let me share the story he told. He used to be a college professor, and he would request feedback from his students at the end of the semester on what could be improved the next time he’d teach the course they took. When he had the sense that his course was just okay, he got relatively little feedback from students. But as his courses improved over time and he knew he was doing a really good job, that’s when he would get more and more feedback from students on what could be even better.

On the surface this seems counterintuitive—why wouldn’t students give more suggestions when his courses were worse? But his observation was that the course needed to be of a certain level of quality and give the students a certain starting point for them to be able to think of what further improvements could look like. 

So my encouragement to you, fellow project manager, is that if the people around you are suddenly bringing you lots of ideas to make project management processes or their experience on projects better, take a step back. They are likely not complaints. They are likely not a heap of new critical work for you to do. Instead, they are likely ideas you’ve enabled because you’ve built a really good foundation of project processes and team experiences already, and those things are working really well.

Behind the ask for more and better, hear the praise for the high-quality experience you’re giving your teams already.