When Is Culture To Blame?

 

When it comes to advancing Project Management capability within an organization, there are two vaguely-defined monsters that keep popping out of dark corners to savagely obliterate such initiatives. They are “politics” and “culture.” I sincerely can’t count the number of times I’ve heard frustrated managers blame one (or both) of these as the reason they failed in their attempts at “doing” PM, as if these causal agents were completely out of their control. Since we can’t counter such monsters without knowing exactly what we’re up against, I’m going to go ahead and take a shot (get it?) at scoping them.

Politics – at least the variety seen in the office – I define as the pursuit of an agenda that benefits the person pursuing it, but is at odds with the advancement of the project team as a whole. Obviously, if the project team seeks to advance PM capability within their organization, and a member of the team sees an opportunity to benefit themselves at the expense of this advancement, the temptation will be to go ahead and engage in a purely political maneuver.

Recall my previous references to the excellent Michael Maccoby, author of the book The Gamesman: The New Corporate Leaders (Simon and Schuster, 1976), where he posits four archetypes of workers:

• The Craftsman cares deeply about his output, but not so much about for whom he works.
• The Company Man tends to adopt the persona of the macro organization.
• The Jungle Fighter gets ahead through calumny and deceit, rather than through actual merit or quality of contribution.
• The Gamesman sees his paycheck, not as food on the table or a roof over his head, but as a token in some grand game he is playing. As such, he tends to both master the rules of the “game” to a greater degree than the other archetypes, and tends to take risks more willingly.

Now, of these types, whom do you suppose would be more willing to pursue a personal agenda at odds with the Project Team’s direction? If you said “Jungle Fighter,” go to the head of the class; however, if you said “Company Man in an environment where Jungle Fighters have significant sway,” you can leave the classroom, go do whatever it is you want, and I will give you an “A” for the semester.  Should the Jungle Fighters and Company Men influenced by them create a sizable bloc within your Project Team, your attempts to further any legitimate agenda – particularly and especially the advancement of Project Management capability – has been hopelessly compromised, and, finally, office politics would be to blame.

Now let’s address “culture.” What is culture, exactly? I generally hold that whenever you hear some manager say something like “In order for Project Management to be advanced within the organization, the culture has to be right” as another way of saying “Our selected strategy for setting up our PMO was profoundly flawed, but we’re going to blame everyone else for it anyway.” It’s easier to split the blame a few dozen ways, so that many people bear some small part of the responsibility, than it is to pinpoint one or two individuals, and make a crystal-clear accusation that their lack of management savvy or integrity was the proximate cause of the organization’s lack of advancement in PM capability. Even this latter is far easier than taking a good, long, hard look in the mirror and coming to the conclusion that the selected strategy was wrong-headed in the first place.

Now let’s combine the inchoate “politics” and “culture” causes of PM advancement failure, and address them head-on. How political is your Project Team, or the macro organization where it resides? Are there many Jungle Fighters? Are they influencing the Company Men who, if you recall, tend to assume the persona of the organization around them? Have they formed a sizable bloc? If the answer to these questions is “yes,” then you can, indeed, legitimately blame “culture” for the difficulties in advancing PM within the organization. However, this raises additional questions: Who let in all the Jungle Fighters? How were they allowed to advance? Their very presence screams out that the macro organization has drifted away from a meritocracy. Why did that happen? How did it happen? And, most importantly, did you stand by as it was happening?

The answers to those last three questions is key to understanding how the political monster savaged your Project Team, and led to the culture that has little trouble thwarting attempts at advancing PM. Any deviance from a true meritocracy leads inevitably towards the types of political machinations that undermine the overall organizational culture, and do so to the point that legitimate attempts at advancing PM capability are pretty much doomed from the get-go.

So, sure, go ahead and listen to failed PMO directors blame “politics” or “culture” as the insurmountable barriers that prevented a successful advancement of Project Management within the organization. Just keep in mind that, contrary to the way they’re being presented, they are almost never purely external to the person complaining about them.