Always On the Clock

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  

Project leaders need to be aware that they are always being observed, that a few careless words have the potential to undermine years of good work. We might think that we would never show poor judgement, but we still occasionally act or speak without thinking, and that’s when we risk serious damage to our teams and reputations.

I recently witnessed a leader communicating a project delay to his team. The team was relieved to hear about the delay, but rather frustrated that it had taken so long to occur. They had been saying that there were problems for quite some time but they had been asked to go above and beyond what was reasonable to work through the issues prior to the decision to delay. The leader had been given some speaking notes to cover with his team in order to ensure that there was a consistent message delivered to all of the impacted areas.

The meeting started off well enough, with the leader explaining why he had called it — the “headline” message. The problems started as he proceeded to discuss what was going to happen next and how the project would recover from the setback. At this point the leader started to add his own editorial comments to the speaking notes — for example, regarding a point about next steps he added “yeah, like that’s going to happen.” The team laughed along with him, but you could see some …

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