Yesterday I was speaking with a good friend of mine who leads a PMO1 team of project managers and business analysts. Sharing stories together often provides much needed perspective. I came away from this conversation thinking about project managers and fool’s gold.
Fool’s Gold
Pyrite is a yellow mineral resembling gold. Inexperienced prospectors during the gold rush of the 1840s sometimes spent much of their precious time and effort focusing on this worthless “fool’s gold”. Others with more knowledge knew how to identify and pursue the true gold.
Power and the Project Manager
Experienced project managers understand the potential they bring to their project and organization. They naturally focus on the primary project management tasks of organizing, coordinating, and managing the work. They know in advance when milestones will be missed and so are able to strategize with their team members such that the project can get back on track2.
They understand that successful project management is a delicate art.
Project Manager as Victim
Like many star performers, my friend comes to her work with a belief in her ability to accomplish what she sets out to do. This may seem like a truism, but it is absolutely essential to your success as a PM. You must believe that your project can be done with the team you have, in the time you have, and without super-human efforts.
If you do not believe that your project can be done, you must come up with a solution before you do anything else. If you fail to heed this advice, your project will fail.
Beginning project managers, and especially those coming from a business analyst or development background, are often used to receiving clear task assignments. This is not generally the case in the PM role. A project manager is expected to “hit the ground running”, “make things happen”, and otherwise shine. Most project managers are responsible for multiple concurrent projects. This means that a new project manager must come prepared knowing how to prioritize. There is often minimal external guidance available.
It’s easy in such a situation to feel powerless, frustrated and angry. In other words, victimized.
The Fools Gold of the Overworked Project Manager
There may not be research to prove this3, but I believe that most project managers enjoy telling other people what to do. Okay, perhaps I am speaking about myself here. But I still believe it holds true for the PMs I know. We just feel that we know how to do things well, and have no problem instructing others on how to do it our way.
This confidence only becomes a problem when we believe we are always right.
When people are under pressure, they tend to revert back to more primitive personality traits. For many of us in the project management field, this is bossiness. When a project manager feels stressed, overworked, or dissatisfied with the output of one or more team members, it’s only natural to start exerting control. This grasping for control is the fool’s gold of project management.
Why it’s tempting
When you press down, you feel more powerful and decisive. It feels as if you are doing the right thing. But it’s not the right thing, and you are less powerful than you think. You don’t even realize that you are on a bad road.
Why Control is Counterproductive
- Control leads to passivity in your team. People will become dependent and wait for you to tell them what to do. Even if they see things that they could improve or take the initiative on, they will assume that you already know and have chosen not to do anything. People will generally give you the quality you expect.
- When you are “in control” everything falls on you. The wear and tear on you is tremendous. Over years, it will reduce your productive capacity. You will eventually burn out and become less effective.
- Control is an illusion. You really cannot control much of anything. By pretending that you can, you are forcing yourself out of reality and dooming yourself to failure in the process.
- The opportunity cost is huge. By trying to control the things your team can decide how to do themselves, you are by definition focusing on the less important things and letting the higher order activities go. Never forget that strategy and vision are your primary responsibilities. If you do not steer the project, no one else will do it.
- 5 brains are better than 1. No matter how good your brain is, it cannot compete with all the creative and executing power of a well-functioning team.
Summary
You don’t need to be in control of your project. You need to lead it. Leadership can be learned.
(Image by tooliver2)
- Project Management Office [↩]
- i.e. meeting scope, within budget, and on schedule [↩]
- If you know of any, please <contact me! [↩]
Please tweet this post!
Career Development
Emotions
Strategy and Leadership
PM News
PMO
Stakeholder Relationships
Tools and Techniques
Never Miss a Post
{ 7 trackbacks }
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Can you tell me who did your layout? I’ve been looking for one kind of like yours. Thank you.
Hi Sue,
The layout is done with Thesis under WordPress. You can learn more about it here. I did the customization. Contact me offline through the comment form if you would like more info.
Glad to have you here with us. Hope the content is useful for you, too.
Alec
Alec — You are so right about this. I’m a writer for an organization, and I have no staff, but I use PM techniques to manage change cycles and multiple project deadlines. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been subjected to extreme review/revision cycles that often involve overediting by my boss. I’ve become discouraged by the inefficiency. Luckily, I haven’t come to take it personally (my work is simply not that flawed), but I have thrown up my hands and said that pending big changes in our process, all bets are off when it comes to deadline adherence. I can’t pad a 200% contingency into each project to hedge against micromanagement; there’s not that much headroom in my one-man shop. This may not be a perfect example for your post, but it does illustrate the link between heavy top-down management and a sense of passivity or disempowerment among team members. Every controlling action from a manager sends the message, “OK, I’m assuming responsibility for this.”
On a more philosophical note, your post makes me wonder what the difference would be between “control” and “influence.”
Take care!
Hi Doug,
Your manager sounds a little like Lumbergh from Office Space. It’s one of those odd things that some managers like this really can keep things moving for a time. They don’t seem to notice or care that the people reporting to them have a level of morale that has fallen through the floor. Others are so fixated on doing and redoing tasks that very little is accomplished. If only they would realize that (a) in most cases an 80% quality level is good enough and that (b) the cost of raising the incremental quality to 85%, 90%, 95% and 99% is progressively steep, with less and less benefit gained.
But your guy wouldn’t really listen to this reasoning, would he?
My suspicion is that some coworkers like this are actually suffering from mild to moderate anxiety. I may approach some anxiety experts to get some pointers on how to deal with this for use in a future post. Let me know if this would be of interest.
Control vs influence
There is a crucial distinction between these two. Control is about force. Influence is about persuasion. Force will always generate an equal or greater reaction which in the business arena will usually show up indirectly. This is seldom useful on a project!
Your attitude seems great in a situation that can’t be easy. Glad to have you with us.
Alec
Thanks, Alec. It strikes me that there are important but often subtle differences between trying to “change” vs. “shape” vs. “accommodate” others’ behavior. One extreme is too controlling, and the other probably too lax (though sometimes unavoidable when people simply drop the ball). The PM needs some ace people skills, indeed, to find the right balance. The challenge reminds me a bit of the sport of ice curling, as the sweepers furiously buff the ice ahead of the stone — not touching it, but steering it by changing the environment. As far as the stone is concerned, it’s just tooling along doing its thing.
Doug,
The image of the sweepers and the stone is just right. Balance, clear vision, good reflexes, swift action when needed, and responsiveness are all essential.
Thanks for the visual.
Alec
Alec Satin´s last blog post..Hey Project Manager! Beware of Fool’s Gold!
Alec,
You said.. (You don’t need to be in control of your project. You need to lead it. Leadership can be learned.)..
To stair a discussion Alec…
I tend to disagree. As you know, Project Management varies by many factors, the type of project, the size, the nature of the people, and the culture of the company…etc. and micro management – although having bad stigma- is suitable under certain circumstances. For example, if you have a very green team and you the only expert, Micro-Management might be needed in the beginning.
I guess what I m saying is, total control is as bad as total hands off style of management. The balance IMHO, is a TRUE leadership in the sense of capable project manager that EARNS the respect of his/her team by demonstrating his/her abilities via maybe applying some control at some point, then allow the team to flourish and shin by hands off style maybe later.
Hope I make sense!
Hany – yes, your points are very well taken. Leadership needs to be earned. A total hands-off management style leads often to “sandbagging”.
Alec