I’ve seen a lot of senior engineers and junior managers, tasked with pushing forward a big and important cross-team effort, hit the same big block. How do you get all those other teams to actually do what you need them to do?

Here’s how I like to visualize this situation: imagine a table at a big family holiday or birthday party. It’s absolutely full of plates, dishes of food, and bottles of wine. And here comes our protagonist (the lead on the big project) holding a beautiful steaming dish of potatoes. Everyone loves potatoes! Everyone knows potatoes should be on the table! And the dish is hot, so our protagonist is rather in a hurry to put it down. But –– there’s no space.

In this analogy, the natural strategy I’ve seen most project champions take is to start talking to everyone about how delicious these potatoes are (importance of the project) and how hot the plate is (urgency of the work). But none of that actually makes space on the table. Someone needs to move things around –– and probably remove some things from the table entirely –– to create a place for the potatoes. If the room is full of people, they all start looking at each other trying to figure out what to shuffle and who is even allowed to remove plates. (Didn’t Grandma bring the green beans, and won’t she be upset if they end up on the side table?)

Usually, when I come into this kind of situation, my only job is to give people permission to remove things from the table. Generally, teams know what should be deprioritized (or have a short list of options) and even know who will care. They might need some help communicating those changes, reassurance from someone trusted that they’re doing the right thing, or tactical help figuring out where else the other plates can go. What they don’t need is yet another argument about why the new project is so crucial – that’s not actually what is getting in the way of making space.

If you’re the one holding the potatoes in this situation, ask yourself a few questions:

• Do I have the authority to tell teams my plate is actually more important than what they already have on the table? If not, who does?
• Can I offer to help teams with removing plates, e.g., by finding other groups that can take on key work or by figuring out and communicating impact?
• Have I taken the time to understand what’s already on the table? How can I show empathy for the difficulty of removing plates?

If you don’t have the ability to help make space on the table, you need a sponsor who does. If there’s no one who both cares about your project and has that kind of authority, it’s probably time to put the potatoes back down in the kitchen and start eating green beans instead.