If I had a colleague hall of fame, he'd be in it. Yeah, he's great to work with, he's great to catch up with, and here, for two-plus years, he's been great to learn from as I've watched him sail into the coordination headwinds.
Your job is full of coordination, and more often than not, you're coordinating things you can't force—you're on the hook for an outcome that runs through a dozen people, and you don't control one of them.
He's responsible for the success of this project. But the project depends on people who don't report to him, and who, to differing degrees, he can "manage" and influence. A vendor. An implementation partner. Business leads with their own slices of the world to protect. Governance still being established as we go. A tech team shared across so many efforts that this priority is never really their top priority.
Moving one step means getting everyone pointed in the same direction at the same time—and every extra stakeholder makes that slower and less likely.
A delay hits and the tech team and the implementation partner each blame the other. He doesn't pick a culprit—he gets them on a call and finds what can move now. A decision sits two weeks because the governance for it doesn't exist yet. He won't wait for perfect; he takes the good-enough call that unblocks the next thing and can be fixed later. Requirements change again—instead of calling that person flaky, he assumes there's pressure on them he can't see, and re-aligns.
And this. Something's stuck, and it'd be easy enough to get it moving with a reply-all that loops in someone senior—let the escalation stand in for progress. He doesn't. He works it at his level first, and when he does take it up, he brings a decision to confirm, not a problem to hand off.
Alex Komoroske mapped this terrain better than anyone—an emoji-driven, twenty-minute deck that's absolutely worth your clicks. I came across it five-ish years ago and find myself returning to it again and again.
The catch: Komoroske's suggestions are aimed at people with control over org-design decisions. And even if that's you, the control ends where your influence does—you can redraw the boxes and still spend the week getting a dozen people you don't command pointed the same way.
For us, coordination headwinds are less something to mitigate and much more something to navigate. There isn't a version of a job without them. So the question isn't how to make them go away. It's this: what do you do on a particularly blustery Wednesday afternoon?
He doesn't hunt for who to blame. He doesn't force what won't be forced. He doesn't hold out for perfect. He doesn't run every obstacle up the chain and call that progress.
Those aren't just restraint. Flip each one and they're moves—and every one starts in the same place: he's quit trying to command what he can only influence. That's the stance. The rest is just what it looked like this week.
Being on the hook for something that only moves when a dozen people you don't command decide to move with you—that's not the hard version of the job. It is the job.
And the way through is a stance. You accept you couldn't make any of it happen by yourself anyway, and you do the job from there. Which is why it's available to you and me. And him.
He's one of the best I've seen at it, and I don't think he'd even call it a skill.