Program tactics is a newsletter for program managers. I write about tactics and strategies to help anyone level up their career and impact (mostly around tech, but applied broadly).
PT#002 The Glue and the Grease - Program Tactics
Program Tactics #002 - The Glue and the Grease
"Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships."
- Stephen Covey
Estimated reading time: 3.5 min.
Program managers are the glue and the grease.
By leveraging this concept, you'll learn how and when to accelerate your impact.
The concept
Glue is what brings people and stuff together, a leadership centric and soft skill approach.
Grease is what removes friction so things go faster, a project management and hard skill approach.
Glue
- Unite people around a common program objective
- Lead meetings and people to the intended outcome
- When materialized risks break the program, put it back together
- Build consensus around a decision
Grease
- Drive improvements
- Remove blockers and impediments to the team
- Leverage networks and resources to accelerate progress
- Plan clearly around the goals so that follow-through is easy
The Tactic
The next time you run into a sticky situation on a program, think about whether you need to add glue or grease. In other words, do you need to bring people together or speed them up?
If the team/program is on the newer side, it's often glue. If the team/program is already well established, it's often the grease.
Example
As a 4-month old employee at Okta, I was tasked with launching an architectural committee to invest in technical transformation for the organization. It comprised of chief and principal architects who have been with the organization for significantly longer than I have and would often talk about parts of the tech stack and org I simply hadn't learned yet. Despite that, it was my role to establish ways of working within this senior team. You could say I was a little intimidated at first, but I kept my cool by focusing on my system of glue and grease.
Glue
In the beginning stages of any program, you're going to be breaking out the glue first.
We needed to create a document of what we were planning to accomplish, the framing of how we'd work, and the purview we wanted to have over process and projects. I setup numerous one on ones, focus sessions, and group meetings with artifacts and follow-ups all in the effort to drive towards a common goal of establishing ourselves and what we were even doing together. We developed mutual understanding as we went through team formation and hit some big storming moments (Forming and Storming in Tuckman's Stages of a Group) until we reached common ground.
After getting our initial meetings and processes going, we started operationalizing past the beginning stages of a team. No longer were we debating about how things would operate, we just operated (moving to Norming and Performing in Tuckman's Stages of a Group). I soon found myself applying less and less glue.
Grease
As the glue cured and the foundation became solid, I broke out the grease to go faster and reduce friction.
As a group, we had ambitions to carry out. Everything from launching a technical talk series, publishing architectural blueprints, and investing in meaningful programs that tend to get deprioritized for some hot product feature. I even leveraged other parts of the company to help me launch our new initiatives and created alternative paths to enable delivery when we hit blockages. I did outreach with people who shared their learnings with me on similar things so that I could drive this forward better and faster. All of these activities were applying grease.
We'll probably hit a challenge again and I'll pull us together again (glue), other times we need to get around an obstacle, so I'll take out the grease. Spot treat as necessary.
Sticking the idea
Oftentimes in order to go faster, we need to glue things tighter first-- this can be through teamwork, shared understanding, and aligning on a common goal. When we're all tight together, this is when we apply grease to make things fast-- planning, removing blockers, applying leverage.
Both glue and grease are required to make an impact as a program manager.
Identify what the situations needs.
Then lather, rinse and repeat.
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Program Tactics Newsletter
Program tactics is a newsletter for program managers. I write about tactics and strategies to help anyone level up their career and impact (mostly around tech, but applied broadly).
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