Dealing With a Resistant Team: Who Is Being Unreasonable?

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   Teams  

Have you ever had to deal with “resistant” teams? Like teams who ended up resisting the authority of the PM and derailing the project as a result? It certainly happened to me when I was young and inexperienced, and I suspect that it happens to most project managers at some point.

It can happen as a result of project managers behaving badly—and the team calling them on it. But that’s an uncommon scenario; more often than not, the problem is caused by project managers actually trying to protect the team, but with unintended consequences. That’s the scenario I want to look at here based on the collective experiences of me and my colleagues.

The team comes first?
The team comes first. This was one of the first things I was taught when I was learning project management, and it has stuck with me throughout my career. At first, it was because I was surprised to hear someone say that the success of the project was secondary to protecting and growing the team. Later, it was because I realized just how important that team growth was to the future success of the organization. I went from thinking it was odd to hear a business advocating that people came ahead of results (this was nearly 30 years ago) to recognizing that the people were the reason the business would succeed in the long term.

In practical terms, this philosophy means project managers …

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