What If You’re Stuck With A Bad Leader?

 

Yes, I know it’s November, but I wanted to get in one more point about ProjectManagement.com’s October theme, leadership. Almost all of the pixel ink I’ve seen on the topic addresses things like the characteristics of leaders, how they’re different from others, and/or how those who are typically not leaders, but would like to be, can become one. This is all fine, but what I’d like to focus on for this week’s blog is a situation virtually everyone who’s ever been part of a team has endured: that of having the person who has been named to a managerial leadership position having little or no true qualities of a leader, or even exhibiting characteristics of one who should never, ever be in such a position. What do you do if you’re stuck with a bad leader?

Consider the following scenario. A fellow comes to work for a contractor straight from a stint as a very high-ranking executive in another very large organization. He actually flunks all three of Hatfield’s Rules of Managerial Leadership:

• He has nothing of value to add to the technical agenda of the project,
• He not only doesn't care about the people on the Project Team, he actually treats them in a highly condescending and adversarial manner, and
• There is absolutely no way he would pursue his own vision, alone if necessary, since he really doesn’t have one.

Nevertheless, this person is brought in as a Vice President, and every whim that emanates from his large corner office is carried out by the craven Company Men and Jungle Fighters[i] within the organization, no doubt in the vain hope that his counterproductive techniques will hurt them least. Nobody on the Project Team is willing to identify the precise reason this person came in to the organization at such a high level, but it would be consistent with this particular company to bring in such people in the hope that they could help win more contracts from the organization they had just left. It does not occur to anybody that the organization this guy just left would resent him as much as the Team learns to, and in short order.

So, what ends up happening? Morale plummets, key deliverables are over budget and late, and any Gamesman or Craftsman[ii] who can leave the project. However, keen observers become aware of one more tell, another clue that this guy is a terrible manager: he really hates Earned Value Management Systems (EVMSs).

Sure, I’m fully aware that a long-standing frustration of us PM-types is the indifference or even recalcitrance of higher-ups in our organizations to recognize and use EVMSs in their project and program work. But I’m not speaking of a garden-variety neutral or mildly irked attitude towards it – I’m talking about full-blown resentment that such things even existed. In our scenario, a certain level of Earned Value rigor is stipulated by the contract, and no level of temper tantrums from this VP can change that. As the cost/schedule performance reports show an ever-deteriorating level of performance, this fellow’s behavior actually worsens. Fortunately for the rest of the Project Team, his Project Controls Analyst is a woman with a spine of stainless steel. She simply can not be bullied into altering her analysis towards supporting a more optimistic narrative and, since something had to be done by the execs about the amount of talent fleeing the project, she can not be dismissed or transferred. Members of the Project Team (well, the braver ones, anyway) could complain to the higher-ups about this veep’s lack of technical qualification, or his treatment of the Team, or lack of vision the live-long day, and such assertions – no matter how true – would fall on skeptical (or even deaf) ears, being, as they were, somewhat subjective. But a Cost Performance Index over twenty points down at the cumulative level? Now that’s something that can’t be ignored. As the Project’s objectively-measured cost and schedule performance worsened, less and less authority would be imparted to this veep, as he draws higher and higher levels of scrutiny for even the mid-level decisions he would make. Eventually he has the title, and the salary, and little else. The whole company folds a few years later, hastened, in part, by their tendency to place bad managers into leadership positions.

The moral of the story provides something of a road map for others caught in analogous scenarios. In the confines of my little story, those who managed the situation best did the following:

• The recognized the bad manager in the leadership position early, and got out.
• Those who couldn’t escape directly became champions of the one information stream that faithfully and relentlessly exposed this person’s penchant for failure, the Earned Value Management System. Indeed, any excessively negative reaction to an EVMS is almost always a sure sign of a poor manager.
• While waiting for the execs to see the poor performance numbers and respond accordingly, the successful ones would simultaneously perform their duties so well as to make themselves indispensable to the Project Team, while doing everything in their power to minimize contact with the veep.

GTIM Nation knows I’ve written at length about the characteristics of managerial leaders, and one of these days I may pen a blog about the characteristics of really bad managerial leaders. When I do, I will definitely include one of the quirkier tells of such ones, that they almost always despise any form of a working Earned Value Management System.

And I will leave it to GTIM Nation to determine how much of my scenario is fiction, and how much was lived reality.

[i] See Maccoby, Michael, The Gamesman, The New Corporate Leaders, Bantam Books, 1976.

[ii] Ibid.