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Rooting Out Resistance
From petty fingerpointing by team members to passive-aggressive stakeholders, all project managers face resistance. How you approach these potentially debilitating situations will make all the difference in turning them around. Here, three project veterans share their experiences and advice.
In a perfect world, every project would be delivered on time and under budget by a group of happy, productive team members. Outside of fantasyland, however, project managers often are forced to deal with everything from bruised egos to Peter Principled executives, from team member frustration over a project’s frequently changing goals to all-out mutiny.
While resistance manifests itself in different ways from project to project and team to team, one commonality is this: Those to whom you report expect you, as the project manager, to recognize and root out such resistance with minimal disruption to the project timeline.
Because resistance, no matter what form it takes, spreads quickly and takes on deep roots, it can completely debilitate a project in short order. That is one reason that Anisha Mason, a partner at Project Solutions Group, suggests the most critical action to take when encountering resistance is probe to find its real cause. “Often the complaint or issue you are hearing is not the real problem,” says Mason, “but something that sits over an underlying concern.”
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