If Your Manager Doesn’t Care, Should You?

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.

  Communications Management  

I recently had a project manager approach me with a problem that was really eating him up. He was assigned to a project that was experiencing difficulties and he was really concerned that it would end up failing. He had tried to discuss the issue with his manager on a few occasions, but the manager didn’t seem at all concerned—and was in fact being dismissive of the project manager’s worries. The question the PM had for me was whether he was concerned unnecessarily, and if he should just take his manager’s advice and stop worrying about it.

It was clear to me there was a problem here, but it might not be the problem the PM thought he was dealing with. Regardless of whether there are material issues with the project, when there is a disconnect of this magnitude between manager and staff, something needs to be done immediately to prevent the problem from getting worse. In this article, I want to look at that element—but also look at how the PM can establish whether he or she should be worried for the project, or should be more relaxed about the situation.

The manager-to-staff disconnect
In this scenario, the project manager is the staff member. But PMs will also find themselves in the manager position in this situation, where their team members are concerned about something they don’t believe to be an issue. Of course there is also the …

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