Epic Villains Require Epic Responses: “Manager. Project Manager.”

 

In last week’s blog I discussed the tactics employed by epic villains who take down their host organizations from their point of view. This week I’d like to explore how to counteract these villains, which requires a James Bond-like hero, just in the PM realm. You won’t need to wear a Rolex Submariner or Omega Seamaster, have a specific, signature alcoholic beverage, or drive an Aston-Martin. You will, however, need to amp up your managerial and observation skills, specifically in the following areas.

The first piece of advice I gave the epic villains was to not reveal their roles as villains, since such ones require subtlety and deceit in order to carry out their nefarious plans. Think (again) Richard from Richard III, or Iago from Othello. So, the first insight I can offer the Project Managers who seek to intercept these villains’ intentions is to learn to recognize them, the earlier the better. Your MI6 superiors will not be giving you an envelope with photos and biographical information about them, unfortunately. Know that learning this skill isn’t easy – even in Bond films most of the epic villains are originally presented as above-board industrialists.

Luckily, the Maccoby archetype of Jungle Fighter (see last week’s post) will invariably throw off some tells, or signs that they’re not on the project team to embrace and pursue the scope. These people are there to advance their own interests, often at the expense of others, and almost always at the expense of the overall project team’s interests. This being the case, Jungle Fighters will often display the following clues:

• In previous blog posts I’ve made a distinction between project personnel who seek primarily to attain the projects’ objectives, and only secondarily are concerned with what’s considered the proper process. I named these people “producers,” and contrasted them with “processors,” or those people who are more concerned with following an approved process than they are in actually attaining the projects’ goals. Jungle Fighters are rarely Producers, in my experience. In a simple process of elimination, it’s relatively safe to assume that your team’s Producers are either the Maccoby archetypes of Gamesmen or Craftsmen.
• Jungle Fighters are commonly the least educated/certified of the team, and are given to expressing a cynical attitude towards the value of post-graduate degrees, professional certifications, or peer-reviewed publications. Those things are hard to attain through calumny and deceit, meaning that they don’t come easily to the Jungle Fighter. Don’t misunderstand – I’m not saying that they are necessarily uneducated per se. There are plenty of Jungle Fighters in University faculty lounges everywhere. But, within a given organization, those employing Jungle Fighter tactics often do so because the legitimate ways of getting ahead are more difficult for them, meaning they lack comparative expertise.
• As the PM, train yourself to be highly observant of the interactions of your Project Team, particularly during the Storming Phase of the Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing model, and especially at team meetings. Craftsmen and Company Men Maccoby archetypes will usually not be noticeably aggressive in their assertions, or in attempting to get their ideas or technical approaches adopted by the larger group. Gamesmen and Jungle Fighters will be, giving you another metric to eliminate more team members from the potential epic villain list.
• Another tell occurs when the Jungle Fighters do something that is borderline unprofessional, and just a little bit creepy. I once had a Team Leader approach my administrator behind my back and ask her for a copy of my daily calendar, under the auspices that he “needed to coordinate his appointments.” This was a lie – he simply wanted to know with whom I was meeting, and when, in order to better scheme his advancement at my expense. This particular admin was not only okay with it, she kept it hidden from me. I switched admins.

Once you have an idea of whom on your Project Team is a Jungle Fighter, what do you do about it? Several strategies can frustrate the Jungle Fighter, including:

• Do not allow any member of your team to discuss a third member with you without that person being present. So much of the Jungle Fighters’ effectiveness comes from the misunderstandings that naturally occur in Project Teams being amplified out of proportion, and ex parte conversations are a huge part of this misunderstanding amplification. Simply don’t allow it, and you deny the Jungle Fighters a key maneuver.
• Make it clear to the entire team that their comparative value to the organization is predicated on attainment of the project’s scope, and nothing else. Not time spent at the desk over a given number of hours, not how they are viewed by others, not how often they play golf with the org’s veeps – none of that. In those projects where I’ve seen the PM consistently place a heavy emphasis on the attainment of the scope, something remarkable happens. The Gamesmen will find common cause with the Craftsmen and begin working with them more closely. Next, any Company Men who can contribute will be engaged. But these producers will almost never voluntarily interact with the Jungle Fighters, seeing their participation activities as a waste of time.
• Reward your contributors in a timely fashion. This will not only lift Project Team morale, thereby engendering even better performance, it will also signal to the Jungle Fighters that they aren’t getting ahead without actually contributing. Frustrated, they will simply seek other Project Teams whose leaders don’t read ProjectManagement.com bloggers, and therefore remain vulnerable to their villainous schemes.

Know that employing these strategies will rarely – rarely – result in immediate payoffs. You’re taking a long-game approach to Project Team optimization, not saving the world in a fifteen-minute span of automatic gunfire, massive explosions, and epic villain comeuppance.

On the bright side, since your competition will not be reflexively driven to destroy your project’s capital equipment, you can expect to avoid tongue-lashings from Agent Q…