This isn’t your typical article on management, filled with silly stereotypes and references to cute animals. So, no learning how to soar with the eagles here. More like squabbling with vultures, while picking over the dead carcass of a failed project. Watch out for that viper in the high grass. Welcome to the dark side of Project Management.
Author: Mark Haynes, https://dmarkhaynesconsulting.godaddysites.com/
Question: How many managers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Answer: Only one. The manager holds the light bulb and the world revolves around them.
A few project metrics for recently minted MBAs and PMIs:
- 33% overrun their budgets,
- 36% miss their deadlines,
- 50% of employees leave due to bad management, and
- 70% fail to meet their objectives.
Project managers do three things: budget, schedule, and control. Conclusion: Project managers are bad at budgeting and scheduling. That leaves control. Did I trigger you yet? Well, I plan to do it many times. The Peter Principle is an adventure in mismanagement. Since you won’t listen to good advice, how about some bad advice? You know you will do it anyway. Let’s consider a few Peter principle schools of management.
All Shall Love Me And Despair
School of Management: The Queen of Mean
Principle: It is better to be feared than respected.
Mantra: Weakness must be punished. You are weak. You must be punished.
Leadership Style: Ghenghis Khan, Leona Helmsley, The Queen of Mean
Quote: “I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.” – Genghis Khan.
Methods:
- Listen aggressively, until they agree with you.
- Use metrics to torture your team.
- Encourage an open dialogue, to identify the traitors.
Nothing motivates a team better than random firings. Fear is the only effective means to motivate a team. It’s best to keep it going until they frag you. If you want high-performing teams, denigrate them mercilessly until you get the desired results. If they aren’t listening, yell louder. The best way to achieve perfection is to criticize the lack of it. That’s how you can obtain your incredibly high and unobtainable standards. Practice interrogation techniques on hapless team members. Take pleasure in the small things, like the fear in their eyes. Displaying weakness will only get you devoured. “In business, there’s no room for weakness; it’s survival of the fittest.” – Leona Helmsley,
Have you picked your cronies yet? You’ll need a few minions, to identify the troublemakers and share in the bullying. It’s the only way to stop them from bad-mouthing you.
Time To Pay The Piper
Wonder why little problems aren’t getting fixed; why innovation stopped, why the team is on cruise control? Stifling conversation restricts the natural flow of ideas. Terrorized people have little incentive to take the extra step. Maybe that’s why your attrition rate is so high. Fear only works for a short time. Go light on the stick and heavy on the carrot. Set standards for yourself and encourage good behavior. Reward success rather than punish failure?
Assume The Position
School of Management: The Alpha Dog
Principle: To build excellence, seek out high performers.
Mantra: The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Leadership Style: Always go for the throat.
Quote: “A lion does not concern himself with the opinion of sheep.” Tywin-Lannister, Game of Thrones.
Methods:
- Use meetings to establish dominance.
- Call on whoever yells the loudest.
- If a little conflict is healthy, think what a lot can produce.
If one high-performer is good, think what an entire team can do. There are only so many kudos, awards, and promotions available. Make them fight for every scrap, like starving rats. It will promote competition. Now with a team of high performers, you can assess the collateral damage they caused. After the “quiet one”, sends a ranting email to their director. It’s time for some serious damage control.
Your job is to badger your team into submission, not to build their confidence. Are you dominating the conversation, when you should be dominating the team? More importantly, have you picked your scapegoat yet? Otherwise, it will be you.
Time To Pay The Piper
Wolf-pack alpha dominance behavior is a misnomer. Wolves engage in collaborative hunting behaviors, organized for stability. It’s counterproductive to increase the number of alphas. Their optimal strategy is to compete against each other, and their primary focus is not on the team’s success. Consider promoting team dynamics that motivate to provide team-oriented results.
I Am The Gate Keeper
School of Management: The Project Management Book of Knowledge is gospel
Principle: All project gates are sacred.
Mantra: Worship no methodology before me.
Leadership Style: Keeper of the Faith
Quote: “Kill them all; let God sort them out.” – Arnaud Amalric, Albigensian Crusade before the Massacre of Beziers.
Methods:
- Obtain permission for every decision.
- Gatesrequire at least 12 approvers.
- Certification beats Competency.
Have you converted your Scrum team into Waterfall yet? How else will you keep control without status reporting, performance metrics, and document reviews? Keeping faith with gate reviews will ensure the work is correct. Impediments are no excuse for missing deadlines, especially after being badgered into committing. Velocity metrics are another way of saying they aren’t working hard enough.
Failure is not an option unless it’s baked into the project plan. If it didn’t succeed the first time, continue doing the same thing again until it does. After all, it’s part of the process. Remember, whoever has the prettiest Gantt chart wins.
Time To Pay The Piper
It’s one thing to champion a methodology. It’s quite another to be its zealot. Hanging on too tight will make you lose control. Maybe a light management framework will work better? Focusing only on the process may guarantee predictable results, barely, at the cost of excessive overhead. Focusing only on the mission may garner great success but at a cost of repeatability. Subordination to the bureaucracy strips away the team’s self-empowerment and the will to succeed. Eventually, it takes on a life of its own.
Quality, The IT Court Jester
School of Management: Quality is King, during Mardi Gras
Principle: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
Mantra: More testing is not in the budget.
Leadership Style: It’s not a defect, it’s an undocumented feature.
Quote: “The quality race has no finish line, so technically, it’s more like a death march.” – Peter F. Drucker.
Methods:
- A problem ignored is a problem resolved.
- The users like it that way, broken and unresponsive.
- Trust me, my code works.
- The users would never do that, not the ones who paid for it.
The job of a quality assurance analyst is to find issues and report on them. So whose job is it to find excuses and ignore them? The forlorn hope of all QA analysts is they will eventually earn the team’s respect. Usually, in the form of belittlement, and blame for finding the problem in the first place. You did touch the code last!
If quality is the third leg of a three-legged stool, why is it so short? If it’s Job One then why isn’t the budget bigger? Are you secretly transitioning the QA team to a productive career in the fast-food industry?
Time To Pay The Piper
Quality isn’t a phase. It’s an intrinsic aspect of the entire deployment cycle. Don’t make Quality Assurance the bottleneck. Provide sufficient resources and time to test each User Story. It’s more than just system testing. Engage the entire team in quality conversations. Conduct post-production defect analysis to identify quality issues.
A Teachable Moment
School of Management: The Evil Kindergarten Teacher
Principle: It’s not a job, it’s an adventure in learning.
Mantra: Do as I say, not as I do.
Leadership Style: Irma Edelson (alien teacher, MIB)
Quote: “No one is the suppository of all wisdom” – Tony Abbott, 28th Prime Minister of Australia.
Methods:
- People react positively to criticism, constant unrelenting criticism.
- A good smack on the hand with a ruler will help them focus.
- Oversimplify the problem, and minimize their achievement.
Management is like raising children. Rebellious, disobedient, obnoxious, and bound for reformatory school children. Every time something goes astray, it’s time for a rousing lecture on how to do it right. Are you stressed, frustrated, or just bored? Take it out on your team. That’s what they are for. Don’t worry they can’t fight back.
A few rules when disciplining the team:
- Never critique, always criticize.
- Show distaste after every conversation.
- Be stingy with praise, unless theyare your favorite.
Time To Pay The Piper
Teaching and mentoring is a noble endeavor that requires patience. Listen more than you lecture. Learning is a collaborative experience. Assuming your team is in a classroom, is annoying. If you use every deviation from the methodology du jour as a “Teachable Moment”, your team will start to resent your efforts. The best way to learn is by doing.
We Seek Technical Leaders – Then Crush Their Spirit
School of Management: The Happy Bunker
Principle: This organization grows leaders the old-fashioned way, one coward at a time.
Mantra: Take that hill. I’ll follow up later.
Leadership Style: The Cowardly Lion
Quote: “Lead from behind. It’s like real leadership except without courage, honor, or commitment.” – www.motivationalposter’sonline.blogspot.com.
Methods:
- Leading by example will only get you shot in the back.
- Communicate with a purpose, never listen with intent.
- Go above and beyond, unless there is risk involved.
Your office is your inner sanctum, where you can productively escape from the daily stresses of work by surfing the net, and avoid making decisions. Create an open-door policy, but have them make appointments so you can avoid people due to conflicts.
It’s vital that not only will your people do what you say but they must believe what you’re saying,
Time To Pay The Piper
Seeking out leaders means allowing every team member to lead, make decisions, take risks, and learn leadership skills. Risk intolerance impedes decision-making and limits potential candidates. Your job as a leader is to grow leaders. Teach them how to lead by your example. People are paying attention to what you do.
Get This Job Done Right, Eventually
School of Management: Micro-manager
Principle: The devil is in the details, so that’s who management must be.
Mantra: Any job worth doing is worth doing over.
Leadership Style: Steve Jobs, Apple CEO
Quote: “A job worth doing is worth doing right, over your shoulder by your boss.” – Micromanagement – Despair, Inc.
Methods:
- Approve every detail and be nowhere in sight for the final review.
- Keep them guessing, request constant updates, updating your detailed instructions each time.
- Question your team’s competency and make them aware you can do it better.
Maximize control and focus on the small details. Avoid strategic thinking. Never provide the big picture, or let them make decisions on their own. Trust no one. If they ask questions, say. “Never mind. I’ll do it myself.” Attend every meeting, including client sessions, rather than sending those directly involved. You need to know everything that’s going on. Focus on the data. Detailed spreadsheets are your friend. Your job isn’t to manage but to make them dependent upon you. Then complain that your team is incapable of taking independent action.
Time To Pay The Piper
Micromanagement is about control. By focusing on the trivial, you will never have enough bandwidth to deal with impediments. That’s what’s stalling your team. Your job is about the workflow, not its details. Providing team goals might just surprise you.
Buzzards Gotta Eat
The tactics used in dysfunctional teams often work, for a time. Inducing fear and intimidation can have a profound effect, especially when the team considers itself a fungible resource, with few options. The world is changing from command-control, factory-oriented work structures to that of knowledge workers, with collaborative and self-empowered teams. If you see yourself in any of this, then we need to talk. Management isn’t about the size of your ego or focusing on power dynamics. It’s about Servant Leadership principle and team dynamics. If you think you’re the smartest person in the room, you aren’t!
References:
Watching Project Managers Crash & Burn
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About the Author
I am a renaissance man trapped in a specialist’s body. I started as a biologist and that’s why I became an IT guy. I love science, but it doesn’t pay the bills. I have been an IT professional for many years. I used to be a software developer with an elegant language for a more civilized age. I became a Quality Assurance guy because it’s better to give than receive. I have been a process improvement specialist because it’s easier to negotiate with a terrorist than a Methodologist. But lately, I’ve been working as a Scrum Master and Agile Coach. I have drunk the Kool-Aid and it tastes good. Agile is a philosophy, not a methodology. In interviews, people often ask how long you’ve been Agile. My answer is always. I just didn’t know what it was called before.