The Ethics Game, Part 2

 

In last week’s blog I likened the efforts to maintain an ethical workplace or project team to the Hawk/Dove Game, and the fact that once a member of the population has selected a counter-productive strategy (“Hawk”), more and more players will do so until the Nash Equilibrium has been reached, which, in Hawk/Dove, is 25% Hawk, 75% Dove. This is true even though the total population’s payoff is maximized if all members maintain Dove strategy. To the extent that members of a project team selecting strategies consistent with the Jungle Fighter archetype from Michael Maccoby’s classic book The Gamesman (Simon and Schuster, 1976) are analogous to Hawk/Dove players selecting Hawk Strategies, there are managerial actions available which can help prevent a downward spiral that results in a thoroughly unethical workplace.

Let’s begin our analysis with a question: what is it that Jungle Fighters do that puts them at an advantage over the other Maccoby archetypes (Craftsman, Company Man, and Gamesman)? It’s been my experience that this type primarily uses three tactics:

• Calumny,
• Exaggerating their own accomplishments and rivals’ shortcomings, and
• Minimizing their own errors and rivals’ accomplishments.

And when I use the term “rivals,” to the Jungle Fighter that’s pretty much everyone else inside the organization, even the superiors to whom they appear to be unctuously supporting.

What do these three tactics have in common? They all involve communicating with other members of the project team, either to those members who are equal to or below the rank of the offending Jungle Fighter in order to establish a consensus narrative, or else to superiors in order to establish their preferred script more directly. All well and good, but, since inter-project team member communications are impossible to control, and difficult in the extreme to even influence, what’s a project manager to do?

Virtually every project manager can dramatically increase the odds that their project teams will behave in an ethical, mutually supportive manner by communicating two key points about the way the team will be managed. Point 1: to the extent the PM is in a position to dole out promotions or other benefits, the basis for doing so will be exclusively based on objectively measured progress towards project goals. Purely tangential or incidental evidence of merit, such as number of hours of free overtime worked, will not enter in to the personnel evaluation process (incidentally, if you belong to an organization where significant amounts of “free” overtime are expected or demanded, it’s too late: such organizations are already chocked-full of Jungle Fighters). Point 2: At the initiation of any conversation among one team member and the PM that involves another member of the team, the discussion will be paused, and that third team member will be called in to participate. There will be no ex parte conversations about other members of the project team, period.

By communicating these two points, the PM will make it clear to each member of the project team, not that they are suspected of being Jungle Fighters, but that the use of the Jungle Fighters’ main tactics will be futile should they ever be employed. By conjoining the terms for the team’s success with that of the success criterion for its individual members, the game has thus been redefined in such a way to dramatically dissuade any part of the population to behave in such a way as to detract from the team’s overall objectives.

Not to sound like a hard-bitten cynic, but it’s been my experience that attempts to improve the level of ethical behavior within a project team by engaging in eat-your-peas-style hectoring is ineffective. The superior approach is to remove the incentive for poor behavior, and the way to do that is to employ a little bit of game theory, as we have done here. There are many other instances where a little game theory can go a long way towards helping PMs attain better results.

Hence the title of this blog and my second book.