The Toil of Sisyphus
Do you identify with difficult, repetitive, frustrating work that’s totally unrewarding? Well, here’s something that may help you do & also deal with it amicably…
It has been over 2 years since I started TPW (The Product Web) my online mentoring targeting working product managers, empathizing with them, lending an ear to all their toils & helping them with workarounds, resolutions, solutions to problems that they happen to face over their regular workflows, which are multivariate in nature and could often go beyond the direct purview of tangible work.
When some have approached me to help them build a strong / winning roadmap, there have been many who wanted to discuss a situation concerning their equation with their managers / skip-level managers / C-suite, which indeed goes beyond conventional workflow taking an entirely behavioral turn. Nonetheless a pretty challenging job and nothing short of magnificent referring to the eclectic mix of problems that I’m hit up with from a really diverse group of domain-agnostic PMs & from across the world. An experience that I have learnt lots from & continue to cherish…
Hitherto, I’ve managed to bail them out successfully. But I can’t help but notice a pattern over how many of them PMs seem to have got stuck in a rut over the expectations their peers, XFN teams, stakeholders, managers, leaders & EXECs carry. The stakes are rich and there’s of course no denying that at all.
At a human level one is bound to carry various ideologies (to each their own of course) which convert to expectations. And its also human nature to have the needle on the expectations tilted towards the others, external sources when the expectations we tend to set for ourselves hit a rock-bottom.
Over a recent conversation one of my mentees asked me for help with something rather unusual & it was this question:
Q: “Could you please share a fun fact about yourself?”
He wanted to know how to approach this question as he didn’t know what exactly he ought to share and was lost for thoughts.
When many would take this question pretty lightly given how it’s usually & deliberately placed at the end of the interview questionnaire and take to narrating past incidents / events / beliefs that they correlate to pretty deeply sentimentally, there’s no doubt about how that could be factored into the evaluation of your candidature.
It is all psychological. It goes by the fact that people tend to reveal their true self only when they feel comfortable / really friendly / a close association with someone. Building such an association obviously runs its course of time. Everybody understands that. But embedding this question over an AI-powered interface deliberately pushing it to the last part of the session when it is also announced that “alright, that was great, you did well with all those questions, now this is about the FUN side of things and a bit about you” the candidates tend to get mentally toned down resulting in a certain degree of callousness over answering them.
Well! Whatever else your answer is, a strong leftist view or a controversial opinion is best avoided as it could prove to be detrimental even if you might have aced all the other subject / domain related questions right up to that point.
So, if you venture on a quest to identify something of a quick fix to alter people’s behaviors towards you or even try and find a way to manage it you’d find yourself in a retrograde, fighting a lost cause, almost always. A better way to tackle the situation is to try and manage your expectations barring which it could end up looking like the “Toil of Sisyphus”.
“Toil of Sisyphus”
The Greek mythology talks of Sisyphus as someone who always played tricks on the Gods to get what he wanted.
He managed to successfully avoid death as well owing to this trait.
Fed up with this unpardonable attitude the Gods imposed a punishment on Sisyphus which involved rolling a huge boulder up a hill slope. The boulder would roll back to the bottom every time he gets it to the top.
Not only was it intended as laborious, but it was meant to be futile, unrewarding & repetitive leading to frustration over every trial.
It is often used as a metaphor for intense, unfruitful & repetitive labor that is totally unrewarding & frustrating in the end.
As I mentioned, there are many PMs who find themselves at the epicenter of this monotonous unfruitful work without even realizing it. But if you find yourself at the receiving end of this behavior from your managers / bosses, it may already be too late in most cases as the onus ought to be on 2 major things upfront:
1. identification of the issue
2. the resolution & its implementation
Here are a few traits to watch out for within the organization, teams & culture in identifying the issue and the unyielding toil:
Now that the issue stands identified, here’s how you methodically break down each of the problems and resolve them (provided you have the power of course):
And, in case you find yourself sans any power to make decisions oriented towards the structuring of teams, you could see that these get passed on as suggestions, after all you’re bound by a moral & civic duty to make things better for yourself.
Well. There aren’t any magical turnarounds anywhere. But implementing & following this meticulously as a protocol org-wide you would notice teams begin to gel, collaborate well given how the reporting structure is able to cascade all granular information at the team-level and aggregate it at the top helping induce objectivity to those XFN teams getting them thinking in terms of goals enabling natural drive towards achieving the outcomes.