Quite often I hear stories from friends and people in my network about difficult coworkers. Usually there is some element of personality conflict in the story or at least an unspoken tension. The stories that are most interesting to me are about good people who are simply wired differently and have difficulty adjusting their natural working styles to the confines of their organization and the impacts it has on the overall team performance…
Take Cathy (“please do,” says Olivia, the friend who told me about her). Cathy is a young social media manager for [redacted] a rapidly growing brand. She is a larger than life personality, full of creative ideas and has never known a stranger in her life. Cathy energizes (or exhausts, according to Olivia) every meeting with her team. She is valued for her ability to pump out ideas in a steady stream but also frequently barely meets and on occasion misses important deadlines that were clearly communicated. For all of the good work Cathy does, her own brand is suffering badly and she might be self-aware enough to realize it.
You probably expect me to immediately jump in with a “Navgar as the hero” solution, but if I’m being honest, for a personality like Cathy the problem is a little more complicated and besides, a quick win is lazy storytelling. For starters, Cathy’s department uses [redacted], a good enough task and light project management tool for most of the areas of collaborative work that Cathy’s team does. Its key shortcoming is not unusual for most workplace collaboration and task management software products in common use: it lacks interactive components beyond task notes and is hardly the hub of their shared working day. Inevitably a lot of conversations about their work take place outside of the place it is warehoused and instead another product, [redacted] is used for in-office chat. Olivia showed me their company’s instance, it was a total [redacted] show. To my sensibilities, instead of serving its users, it was offering total information overload, poor message organization, constant notifications, context switching, and way too many channels to be a high functioning communication space. An employee like Cathy might really enjoy using [redacted] for its social elements and might inadvertently get something done, that is after jumping through multiple channels and hunting through threads.
I do think Navgar would serve someone like Cathy well for a few reasons. As chat is embedded in tasks, the lift is much lower to engage in highly structured conversations. The visibility of the task is enhanced for her and the assignor as well (good for keeping an eye on those deadlines). The abstraction and dilution of work in [redacted] is removed and because there is a lot of interactivity and socialization.
