Recognizing Jungle Fighters and Ds

 

In last week’s blog, I made the argument that expanding and enhancing communications for its own sake is inherently dangerous, since there are going to be people in the organization who (a) are actually against you and your technical agenda advancing, and (b) will never willingly reveal themselves to be your adversaries. The actual structure I used to describe the members of the project team was:

1. Those who readily embrace the change you are attempting to implement,
2. Those who will eventually embrace the change you seek to implement, but only after they are convinced that it will benefit them directly,
3. Those who will resist until they are virtually forced to participate, and
4. Those who will be dead-set against you and your technical approach to the end.

That last category – the Ds – are analogous to one of the four archetypes described by the excellent Michael Maccoby in his book The Gamesman, the one he calls the Jungle Fighter.[i] The Jungle Fighters will use calumny, deceit, and other cloak-and-dagger tactics to get ahead, since they are generally untalented in the technical aspects of their jobs. They are, however, very good at hiding their true intent and the counterproductive nature of their favorite tactics.

How, then, can the astute PM learn to recognize the Jungle Fighters and Ds in the project team?

First, let’s deal with the organizational environment where they live. Just as it’s useful to know that a black widow spider has a red hourglass-shape on the abdomen, it’s also fairly useful to know that they like to live in places like wood piles, and that their webs are fairly chaotic in appearance. Similarly, Jungle Fighters/Ds prefer organizations with the following characteristics:

• Organizations that are truly merit-based in their hiring and promoting decisions are anathema to Jungle Fighters, since actual merit isn’t their long suit. Conversely, organizations that are infested with cronyism (or, under certain circumstances, nepotism) attract them by the boat load. If the most talented people are notably absent from upper management, the odds are pretty good that you are in the company of Ds.
• Are ex parte conversations allowed? If you need to spend any time worrying about what your peers are saying about you behind your back to your management, you may have a Jungle Fighter problem.
• Think back to a time where upper management addressed a significant problem, but their approach didn’t work. Were there any dissenters early on? If there weren’t, it could mean either that no one on the team recognized the soon-to-fail approach as weak, or else they did recognize it as sub-optimal, but didn’t want to risk speaking up. The stifling of communications from the rank-and-file upwards is an unmistakable sign of the presence of Ds.

As for identifying individual Jungle Fighters/Ds, here are a few sure tells:

• When stressed or frightened, does the suspected team member take on an aspect of angry condescension?
• Has the suspected team member attempted to gossip or engage in negative judgementalism about other employees?
• Develop objective measures for gauging each team member’s contribution towards achieving your scope on-time, on-budget, and observe their progress against those measures. Ds may not consistently be in the lowest quintile, but they’ll struggle mightily to stay in the upper half of performers.

Enhancing communications within a project team is nominally a good idea, since information is the life-blood of the organization. Just be careful of who shares in those communications – they may have either an hourglass shape, or the letter D, rendered in red on their abdomens.

[i] Maccoby, Michael, The Gamesman, Winning and Losing the Career Game, Bantam Books, 1978.