The Electric Kool-Aid Certification Test

 

I’ve worked with an organization that had the habit of acting like the next manager being brought in was some kind of Tom Wolfe-esque microeconomic rock star, whose name should have been instantly recognizable to the hoi polloi. After building up this person relentlessly, this person would finally arrive to take up their new position, and…

Well, nothing.

Nothing spectacular, no new ways of approaching the problems the project team faced, no novel implementation strategies to known workable tactics, nothing. They wouldn’t even bother figuring out how the current systems operated. Oh, they would crank up the energy level for a time, and get into meetings where they would strongly emphasize trite and clichéd axioms. But as far as actually advancing a capability, they were able to deliver only a whole bunch of nothing.

Not. A. Thing.

And Then, After Fleeing to Mexico…

Eventually these “superstar” managers would be re-assigned, and another one breathlessly announced, and the cycle would begin again.

After witnessing this cycle repeat a few times, I began to notice something that all these new managers had in common: none of them were certified.

A few weeks back I blogged about the difficulties inherent in working for organizations where loyalty, not talent, was considered the key attribute for the staff to demonstrate. The pathologies inherent in such an organizational approach are legion, but one of the key indicators that an organization is so situated is that they do not place a premium on professional certifications. In those cases where an apathy is associated with the attainment or holding of a relevant professional certification, and it is combined with a laxness about educational requirements, then the odds that the organization is even remotely based on a meritocracy are low, indeed.

Which kind of puts the whole certification impetus upside-down. I mean, when I was pursuing my certs, it was in an effort to signal to current and future employers that my level of expertise was more advanced than my non-certified competitors and colleagues. And almost exclusively that’s how the attaining-your-certification industry advertises its worth, by promising to make the successful cert candidate, well, more successful in the long run. But what I have observed is that it’s the winning organizations that will attract certified project managers, project controllers, and cost estimators in a way that their more poorly-functioning competitors do not.

Who’s being tested here, anyway?

To be precise, I am not saying that those organizations that make it a point to send their employees to certification training and reimburse them for their certifications are going to automatically begin to out-perform their competitors. What I am saying is that a fairly reliable sign that an organization is at least somewhat merit-based in its hiring and promotion practices will tend to attract more highly educated and certified employees, and that those dysfunctional organizations, where loyalty is the coin of the advancement realm, well, won’t. Indeed, one of the best ways to prevent a given hiring manager from filling a key position (or any position, really) with an underqualified – or even inept – candidate, who just happens to be an old friend, is to strictly enforce standards for even being interviewed for the position. In the project management world, educational requirements (past the attainment of a Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree) can be tricky – they don’t call PM “the accidental profession” for nothin’. Successful PMs come from extremely varied areas, including computer science, engineering, the hard sciences, or even business, among others. But a PMI® certification – that’s something different. That communicates that, regardless of background, its holder knows a thing or two about managing projects. Because of this, an unintended consequence of including it as a prerequisite is that it can function as a brake on cronyism, at least in its most blatant manifestations.

So, all this time, when you saw a requirement for a PMP® just to apply for a project management job, you thought they were testing you. In reality, the whole time they were advertising their own suitability as an organization worthy of your talents.