The interesting thing is that actually honestly communicating "I just need everyone to finish everything within the quarter - by the exact date - regardless of any company-wide freezes or red tape - because I get scored on it by my boss" can easily work; that's a clear measurable goal that gives others clear guidelines on the actual priorities and what can be cut if necessary (e.g. quality or features) and what can't (deadlines) and the team can execute that even if the goal is arbitrary, and the alignment of goals is clear - if you miss deadlines to help customers, then you're not surprised that the boss is unsatisfied with your performance and wants to replace you, and if you can manage the deployment process so that the feature "counts as deployed" (even if it's not really ready) at the arbitrary quarter it needs to, then you're a valuable employee for whom they'll find a way to arrange whatever budget is needed to keep you.
It's especially relevant in B2B work - you have to know what the actual personal goals of the decision makers at your customer business are, because your job is to address that; you're not there to bring them in more revenue or satisfy their customers, your actual goal is to help the manager signing your checks to meet his quarterly KPIs/OKRs/whatever, so you'd better know and prioritize the exact things on that list.
> "I just need everyone to finish everything within the quarter - by the exact date - regardless of any company-wide freezes or red tape - because I get scored on it by my boss" can easily work; that's a clear measurable goal that gives others clear guidelines on the actual priorities
This only works if they actually communicate it before projects start. Which they did not. Which is the whole point of the original article - "internal comms" is the issue. Just being honest and timely is sometimes enough but management doesn't think they can do that.
It's especially relevant in B2B work - you have to know what the actual personal goals of the decision makers at your customer business are, because your job is to address that; you're not there to bring them in more revenue or satisfy their customers, your actual goal is to help the manager signing your checks to meet his quarterly KPIs/OKRs/whatever, so you'd better know and prioritize the exact things on that list.