Once me and my team had to mediate a service integration between a high profile client and an eager third-party service by guiding both teams to develop whatever was needed to make it happen. The service in question was simply “too good to be true”. After my first meeting with them, and after them stating that the integration shouldn’t take more than 1 day, I strongly advised against their product altogether as it was obvious they were not a serious company. They didn’t listen.
During the actual integration it was very obvious, very soon, that we couldn’t integrate much of the promised features because, well, they simply didn’t exist. We were kept chasing our tails waiting for documentation and specifications that never came, while spending money and time of our client who now had the “1 day integration” as his new benchmark. In client meetings, the third-party service’s CEO remained very cool with all of my concerns and kept brushing off any suspicion with a surprise look on his face, and I could tell that our client was beginning to question our excuses for not making things work.
What on the tech side was obvious on every piece of documentation (or lack of), on every technical meeting and every technical chat between the teams, was not obvious at all for our client which had absolutely no technical knowledge.
I then started to compile all of the things that we were finding wrong with their team and product hopefully. From chat messages from the service’s tech team stating the exact obvious of what their CEO was preaching, to documentation never delivered with the exact dates of the meetings where they were promised those.
When presenting my case I soon realised that my level of frustration had turned a “findings meeting” into a “ranting meeting” where the point was not to solve my client’s problem but to complain about their choice and point out to all the bad things “the other guys” were doing. This achieves nothing and made me the weak link in the discussion. Negativity is destructive and leaves no room for creative thinking and therefore, solutions. Worse, this opens up room for someone else to do my job, which is lead.
As a next step, I then arranged a call with all stakeholders including lead technical people from both teams. As stoic as one can be, I led a tailored, well prepared and very constructive Q&A session, where the other team had no real answers for. Instead, we did. We had a plan B and C prepared on how to mitigate every scenario, move forward, and save the project.
TLDR: Every problem has a solution or at least a path to one, and complaining is a poor placement of energy and time. Jocko Willink nails this in Extreme Ownership — the moment you stop pointing fingers and start owning the problem, you become the one driving the solution, and that’s where trust and leadership come from. This becomes worse when one’s role is to lead or provide answers. In this specific case, the outcome could have been achieved faster, cheaper and with a lot less friction if I had been focused on proposing solutions rather than exposing culprits. These would, as they did, appear in the end as a by product of our leadership.
End of the day, nobody cares, just get sh*t done.