How do cross-functional peers typically communicate feedback to you in the workplace?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

I recently had to onboard 20 directors and managers to financial resource
planning system to prepare for 2025 budget
I organized training session where we invited new users as well as those who
used the system before.
At the onset of the session , one of the managers, Joe,  vocally criticized the
forecasting system. He especially hit on leverage of Excel for data entry. He
shared his frustration about entering numbers in Excel and requested to rebuild
the system. I faced difficult situation where new directors were given negative
messages that do not add confidence to the task they were expected to do.
My task was to address his concerns while staying focused on preparing the
forecast for 2025.
I considered few options: from sharing that this is not a forum for feature
requests, to shifting focus to task at hand and overriding his speech with
message about budget that we try to prepare.
I chose an approach where I shared difference between situation of Joe with
everyone else's.
Joe has large org of over 30 engineers with frequent employee changes. That
causes a lot of data updates. The new managers have typically 3- 5 employees in
the team and the employees stay for years.
I acknowledged the message from Joe, and offered to get back to him. With that I
offered a live demo online training for everyone else so they can see for
themselves how to enter the data. That helped the team to be 50% ready at the
end of the training.
Deflating the situation was only half of the task. A few days later I reached to
Joe to reflect on the situation.
I shared that first of all he is heard. I asked a lead engineer in my team A to
work with Joe on implementation plan. After that I said that his message made it
very difficult for the new team members to get ready for the budget.  Joe's
request is at least 6 months to 9 months long while we needed the budget in 10
days.
As result Joe saw how the situation looked from point of view of new managers.
He felt apologetic, but I smiled and told him that its OK and we will be good
friends . Finally we not only retained good working relationships , strengthened
by this moment but I was also able to help new managers to get ready for the
2025 budget.
In retrospect it would be beneficial to review attendees before the meeting and
pre-work the possible situation. That will be a good learning for the future.

Anonymous · Answer

Once I had to provide a feedback to one of my cross-functional stakeholder. We
were working on a project that had to deal with a legacy system supported by my
team but no longer actively developed or improved. The engineer who had the most
experience in this system has gone so my team expertise was at a level where we
needed to invest some time into recovering the expertise. We were tasked to make
an enhancement on the system in order to align with a major product release. I
communicated clearly to the manager that we have a risk of missing the deadline
here since we had to acquire the expertise and enhance the system with the new
functionality so a probability of unexpected bugs was also there.  So when the
deadline approached it actually turned out that we cannot meet it due to
extended bug fixing phase and 2 days before the deadline the manager approached
 us with a take that we are expected to meet the deadline as well as make some
adjustments to the initial requirements because the communication to the outer
partners was already performed and in order to meet our promises we have to
finish up to the deadline. Recognizing that this is not a behavior I expected
from a stakeholder with whom I communicated the risks upfront, I scheduled a 1-1
session with him in order to give him a feedback on our collaboration. I
initiated a dialog by telling him that initialy I communicated clearly that we
have a risk of missing the deadline here and clearly explained why this could
happen upon this I expressed my frustration with him not managing the
communication with the partners appropriately and not letting me know about
that. I also asked him to explain the reasons behind this situation and proposed
to come up with a plan for this particular case and for the future policies. To
my relief, he agreed making a mistake telling that he missed on our initial
dialogue. Together we crafted a plan to release the feature with the bug
aknowleding them as not critical for initial phase. We also agreed on a future
plan where we would check on the project progress more frequently and notifying
me on major project updates more frequently.

How do cross-functional peers typically communicate feedback to you in the workplace?

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