Managing the Gray

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Leadership   ProjectsAtWork  

Clarity and consistency are important qualities for project leaders, and rules must be respected in a corporate environment or chaos will reign. But when it comes to leading people, many, if not most issues are rarely clear cut. Interpretation and application of the rules make all the difference.

I’m not sure if this is going to be a ‘controversial’ article, but I do suspect that not everyone will agree with my perspective — so much the better; that adds to the meaningful debate.

I was talking to a project manager recently who was having some issues with someone on her team. The individual was getting all of his work done, delivering quality, and was a solid team member. The problem was that he was spending a lot of time surfing the internet for personal benefit, and the organization had a policy about not using the internet for personal use.

The project manager didn’t know what to do — she felt that she needed to say something, but didn’t want to upset an individual who was a valuable contributor to the project.

This is not about surfing the web. There are a number of issues at play here from my perspective:

• The corporate policy that is being violated
• The setting of a precedent that others will point to
• The need to maintain a strong, high-performance team

On the face of it, this would seem to …

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