When Nobody Cares about Your Projects

I was chatting with an email subscriber the other day, and he was telling me that when he’s assigned a project, it’s on him as the project leader to convince other company employees to complete the tasks his project needs done on top of their regular work. Nobody is directly expected to help with his projects as part of their job.

I’m fortunate that as a project leader, I haven’t yet been in this situation. But this isn’t the first time I’ve heard a story like the one my subscriber told. Perhaps in the name of “doing more with less” or “pushing employees to find creative solutions,” company leaders sometimes expect project leaders to achieve project goals without giving us access to the resources (human or otherwise) we really need to achieve them.

What’s really going on here

First and foremost, if you’re in this situation, please stop and take a moment for some self-care. I’m not sure if you feel angry about your situation, or frustrated, or if you feel like a failure, but please take some deep breaths and say the following things to yourself:

• This is not my fault.
• I’ve been put in an impossible situation.
• The expectations being placed on me are unreasonable.
• I am good at my job when I’m given what I need to succeed.
• It’s totally valid if I feel drained from having to drum up resources on top of leading successful projects.

What you’re being asked to do is hard—borderline impossible, in fact—and, at best, exhausting and demotivating. You shouldn’t be in this situation.

What’s going on is that your company’s leadership is failing you in this area. It’s your company’s job to provide your projects with adequate resources or money to acquire them, and it’s not doing that job.

You are likely living with the consequences of one or both of these scenarios:

1. Your projects don’t have a lot of leadership support.
2. Leadership isn’t great at agreeing what your organization has capacity for or what’s truly a priority.

If the first scenario resonates with you, it probably means someone in middle leadership has been allowed to operate initiatives in a silo off to the side, because senior leadership wasn’t able to make the hard decision to either incorporate these initiatives into the main company goals or cancel them. And this middle leadership person is either your boss or your boss’s boss, or for some other reason is allowed to assign you projects. I’m so sorry you’re in this position. Maybe you even believe in the projects being assigned to you, but senior leadership doesn’t believe in them enough, otherwise they’d make sure you had access to proper resources.

If you’re in the second scenario, that’s slightly better in principle because somebody at your company isn’t being knowingly sidelined, but the impact on you is similar. It means your senior leadership doesn’t take the mismatch between your company’s capacity and the requirements of its initiatives seriously, or perhaps they just aren’t measuring these things very accurately. So maybe leadership cares about your project in theory, but because your company is running over capacity, your project is being deprioritized out of necessity.

All this to say, I know when I’m in a painful situation, it helps me to have clarity about why the situation exists. I hope you see yourself and your company somewhere in the above and it helps put things into perspective for you.

What to do about it

So you’ve wrapped your head around the situation but you still need to face it every week. What can you do about it?

First of all, looking for a different job is potentially an option. If your mental health is being significantly impacted, I encourage you to consider this. If you have other options, a job isn’t worth sacrificing your mental health.

But let’s say for now you’ve decided to stay and make the best of it—or you want to make the best of it until you have your next job offer in hand! I see three routes you can take to make things better for you and your projects. I recommend you try all three because each is likely to work to some degree, and probably to a different degree for any given company or set of people involved. If you try them all, you’ll get the most improvement you can.

1. Honestly but diplomatically take your struggles to your boss or others in leadership.

Start with your boss if you can—this will prevent the complications of going over your boss’s head. Diplomacy looks like picking the right time, acknowledging preconditions or challenges that could have created the situation, and having realistic expectations about any timeline for change. Honesty looks like being clear about the challenges you’re facing because if they’re not clearly understood, they can’t be solved.

Try a statement like this:

“I would love to achieve X project goal, but that’s difficult because nobody with Y skill has time to help. Can you help me get access to someone with Y skill? If not, I really need you to understand that X project goal is at risk. Or, alternatively, is X project goal not a true priority? If not, I’d be happy to spend my time on something else that will add more value to our company!”

There might be lots of reasons you don’t feel comfortable taking this to your boss, however. Or maybe you’ve tried and it hasn’t worked. If that’s the case, pick someone else strategically. You’ll want someone who cares about your project and has authority to get you resources . . . or authority to cancel your project! Getting an unimportant project canceled is just as much of a win because it means your time can be reallocated to projects that are important to the company (unless you think getting your projects canceled will also get you laid off . . . In that case, keep your head down but start your job search now). In picking someone in leadership to elevate your needs to, if you can identify a valid reason for going to them instead of your boss in case someone asks, that would also be in your best interest.

In a healthy company, you should be able to find people who appreciate your honesty. You are giving your leadership information they need to make good, intentional decisions about how company resources are allocated.

2. Try new strategies to motivate people to help with your projects.

While a boss’s expectations and a company’s metrics can significantly influence how workers spend their time, so can other factors like who they have good relationships with, who they have fun with at work, or who appreciates them most. You can use softer factors like these to encourage people to want to make time to work with you and help you.

It might take a little extra time and effort on your part, but it doesn’t have to be a lot. People like helping people they like. Who can you grab lunch with, be a listening ear to, praise for a job well done, or help with something they need? If you’re at a company where people are under-resourced, chances are you’re not the only one, and your coworkers will have empathy for your plight. Can you band together with other employees in your mutual struggle to do more with less, rather than let it drive you apart?

3. Keep up your self-care and keep grounding yourself in the reality that you shouldn’t be able to succeed in the current conditions (so any time you do is a miracle!).

What can you do to emotionally distance yourself from your situation and make sure you don’t internalize expectations that aren’t realistic? Can you write your own list of goals and expectations for yourself at work that are realistic, and make this list the primary driver of your efforts? Can you do a better job of emotionally leaving work behind at the end of the day, making sure you get a true break from that environment? Can you work on some personal goals that are achievable to help yourself keep believing you’re a person who can achieve goals?

And gosh, when you do manage to achieve project goals despite the lack of resources and the odds against you . . . tell your friends and family about it. Tell them how amazing you are and let them validate you. I like to say that project managers are superheroes . . . and that doesn’t mean your company should expect you to do the impossible day in and day out, because you are, in fact, human. But once in a while, because you’re amazing, you’ll pull it off anyway. That sounds like a superhero move to me.