Primary project manager
On this project, I lead the instructional design team. Joe leads the development team. The stuff his employee team and my contract team put together is magic. He can translate our instructions into programs that make our eyes pop out! On days when our teams get together to review the latest and greatest, we "squeal with delight" and do the happy dance. (What a great gig!) On a regular basis, we each tell Joe & his team how lucky we are to have them. (On some IT projects, our neat ideas have come out looking like rocks. A dedicated development team makes a HUGE difference--- as I'm sure you know.)
I'm discussing phase two with the primary project manager (the big guy responsible for everything) when Joe shuffles up to the door. He asks about a program that he requested two weeks ago to make QA easier. All of a sudden, out of no-where, he blurts out, "All I want is to be appreciated!" And then he looks embarrassed and starts to shuffled back to his group.
What do you do? Was Joe's comment symptomatic of a larger problem within his group? Was he simply exhausted from a tight deadline? Is my team's enthusiasm part of the problem? Or is this one of those squeaky wheel problems?