Originally published on LinkedIn on January 19, 2026. Read and engage with the original post here.
Recently, I was having coffee and reflecting over my 20+ year career in tech most recently as a Technical Program Manager. It’s funny, I started to really struggle to remember the details of some of the projects I worked on, including the really cool ones. Sure, I remembered the deliverable, some of the feelings of stress getting the thing out the door and the launch party, but not a ton about the project structure, the tooling, the schedule or other process related stuff. But one thing stood out.
The people.
Names, conversations, challenges, bonding and details about people’s lives came flooding back with ease. I remember getting pulled into a conference room years ago by a report who was struggling. And they told me that they were having some relationship issues and that was causing their performance to suffer. We pivoted away from project stuff and figured out how they could get the time/space to process and deal with challenges with their relationship.
When they returned to work, they were one of the top performers on the team. I remember a colleague who gave me tough feedback. I wasn’t getting into the technical details enough which caused me to be less effective on the project. That initially hurt, but I took the feedback to heart and invested more time in understanding the technical aspects of the project and getting hands on. And guess what? My colleague was right! Once I had a stronger knowledge of the systems, I was way more effective.
The learning in all this? Program Management is about people. And as AI can tackle more of the grunt work of program management from task tracking, to scheduling to producing status reports, Program Managers will need to focus more than ever on being organizational therapists.
So how can Program Managers make organizational therapy their superpower?
Frustrations Are Risks
We’ve all heard it. A team member vents about the friction with tooling, unclear requirements or difficulty getting anything out of a dependent team. And likely if we are running the program, we are among the first to hear it.
It can be very easy to dismiss these frustrations and tell folks to “deal with it” or “that’s just how things work here” but that is literally poison for projects. Frustrations are yellow flags indicating there could be a major underlying problem. So, take frustrations seriously. Work with the team to debug the source of the feelings. Consider using the 5 Why’s approach where you ask “Why” five times to identify the root cause.
It’s possible the conversation reveals something that can be fixed. Not just a symptom, but something systematic that truly addresses what caused the frustration. If so, that’s great! It’s also possible that there is nothing that can be done about the frustration. And that’s OK too. If nothing else, the team member felt listened to, and that you took their concern seriously. That’s massive in the trust building department.
Remember, AI can’t detect the subtle signs in a 1:1 that someone is frustrated or nearing the end of their rope. You can.
Practically, consider having “team morale” in the project risk register. Review it with the team as a group. See what concerns come out of it. You might be surprised by some of the feedback you get. Frustrations are emotional indicators that often predict problems before they become measurable. Today the conversation is about frustration. Tomorrow the conversation is about velocity dropping or code quality decreasing. Get ahead of it.
Psychological Safety
Reading a status report for a project can sort of be like watching the evening news. Alot of bad news. Risks, technical setbacks, and potential schedule slips are a daily occurrence on complex programs. And yet, they can be surprisingly difficult for team members to surface.
Let’s face it, nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news. Fear of a negative reaction, being blamed for the problem or fear of looking incompetent can cause any of us to hesitate to surface a real problem. The issue is, if problems aren’t identified as early as possible, their impact can skyrocket.
I remember a project where we were consistently missing targets on our two-week sprints. We kept kicking tasks down the road sprint after sprint and it was at our retrospective where delays were being surfaced. Not at our daily standups when we had a chance to address them. After 3 consecutive sprints like this we took a step back and had an open and honest discussion. The team surfaced that they were nervous about identifying blockers that could lead to more work and cause our backlog to grow because the Project Owner and I had been emphasizing that we could not afford scope creep. Thus, they were trying to absorb this additional work into the current sprint.
That hit like a ton of bricks. In our attempt to manage scope, we were making it unsafe for folks to raise real issues and even bugs they were finding. We knew we had to change our culture immediately. We did the following:
- Unplanned scope or bugs were put into new tasks (not just lumped onto the original task where they were discovered) so that we could acknowledge and document that this was unplanned work.
- When unplanned work was identified, we celebrated it. We thanked the team members publicly, which made finding issues, well, cool!
- At backlog grooming, we made tough calls about how to deal with this unplanned work. In the end, we had to drop some P1 features, but these were delivered in a future version of the product.
Lesson learned: Don’t just make it safe to raise problems, reward it!
The Pulse
Peter Drucker is credited with saying “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” And we often follow that advice when it comes to measuring KPI’s, burn-down rates, velocity and the critical path. But do we follow it when it comes to measuring how our team is feeling?
Measuring morale is a different animal from measuring project statistics. We’re talking about feelings, motivations and past experiences here. This is where a human Program Manager with high emotional inteligence will shine. They will actively seek to observe morale. They can do this via:
- Consistent office hours
- Team meetings with skip manager
- Temperature checks in team meetings
- Meals with team members
One exercise I have gotten awesome temperature checks from is scheduling a meeting with the team, asking them to provide me with feedback and then leaving the room so they could discuss honestly and openly without me being present. I shared that the feedback could be about me, the project or anything else and 100% anonymous if they wished. Let me tell you, I got a multi-page feedback document and it was awesome. There were a ton of things in my blind spot both on the project and my way of working that were impacting morale. Getting that honest assessment from the team helped us work together to adjust things on the project to make it better for everyone.
And here’s the thing: AI can help me synthesize meeting notes, track action items, even flag schedule risks. But it can’t tell me that the engineering lead and the product manager aren’t actually aligned, even though they’re both nodding in meetings. It can’t sense that morale is slipping because the team hasn’t had a win in three sprints. That requires being present, reading the room, and caring about the answer.
So, what’s one thing you can do this week to better support your people?