What Happens When a Project Falls Outside Your Team's Capabilities?

A problem shows up, or a new project needs to happen — and it lands on whichever department seems closest to it. And surprisingly often, it doesn't move.

Two reasons, almost always.

First, management never actually names an owner. The instruction goes out to "the department," not to a person, and inside that department everyone quietly waits for someone else to pick it up. They already have their own targets to hit. And often, what's being asked for isn't something they know how to do in the first place.

That second part usually gets dressed up as "it's outside my job description." Sometimes that's true. Sometimes it's really just people protecting the work they're measured on, so anything unfamiliar gets quietly set aside. Underneath both, there's something worth saying plainly: not everyone has the same appetite for the unfamiliar. Some people take on a new challenge and figure it out as they go. Others are excellent at what they do — and stay exactly there.

I saw exactly this play out firsthand.

In one meeting, an executive — let's call him A — pointed out that we had a large amount of stock sitting unsold, and he wanted to turn it into cash. Shipping it to the U.S. would have meant redesigning the pieces first, but the company didn't want to absorb that cost — the labor, the time. So the plan became: sell the existing stock as it was, and ideally open up a new sales channel while doing it.

That's how the idea came up — sell the stock on television.

There was just one problem. The department had no storefront-style sales team. All we had were merchandisers who sent quotations to customers by email — a world away from speaking to a camera and explaining a product live. What A was proposing was beyond what they were equipped to do; it called for a completely different skill.

A gave the job to me.

I'd never sold on television before. What I did have was years of experience selling jewelry, online and offline. At first I was genuinely worried — I'd never spoken to a camera before, and I couldn't picture how any of it would look on screen. But on my first time selling live on Thai television, even scared and completely unfamiliar with the format, I gave it everything I had — and it went well.

What made it work wasn't just showing up and talking. Some of the stock we had wasn't right for a Thai audience — certain cuts and colored stones read as American style, and Thai buyers wanted something else. I knew which stones Thai buyers actually liked, what they'd pay for them, and what a piece needed to look like to sell. So before I ever went on air, I was choosing the stones myself, designing the rings myself, and setting the price myself — working out what a Thai buyer would pay, what the station needed to mark the piece up to, and what I could sell it to them for.

Most of what I sold, the buyers didn't already know. So on air, I taught them — where the stone came from, its history, why it was selling well in America. Get the product right and the price right, and the sale mostly takes care of itself. Presentation and chemistry with the host still matter — but neither one saves a product that's wrong for the buyer or priced wrong for the market.

I later learned that the head of merchandising had been watching that first broadcast too, tracking how I performed and how much I sold. The rules of that world were blunt: sell, and you're invited back. Have a bad first outing, and you might get a second chance — but a second bad outing, and you're done, because every broadcast carries a sales target you have to hit.

I kept getting invited back. What started as twice a month grew to seven or eight times a month. Eventually the station asked if someone else from the company could take over some of the slots — they were worried viewers would get bored seeing the same face and wanted more variety.

Not one merchandiser stepped forward.

They had the same product knowledge I did. But television selling asked for a different combination of skills — reading two markets at once, curating and pricing a product for each, translating that knowledge live, with a sales target attached to every appearance. Those weren't skills the merchandising role had been designed to develop. The business had opened a new channel that required capabilities the existing roles had never been designed to provide.

What made it work wasn't simply that I said yes. A recognized that the project required a different combination of capabilities, looked beyond the org chart, and gave one person clear ownership.

That's the difference between knowing a business and being able to take it somewhere it hasn't been before.

Sometimes a new project asks for something the existing organization wasn't built to provide. That doesn't mean the team is failing. It simply means the project may need a different owner, a different capability, or someone brought in specifically to move it forward.

If you have a project sitting still for that reason, let's talk.