COVID Impact As Litmus Test

 

GTIM Nation regulars know my respect and admiration for Michael Maccoby, particularly his book The Gamesman; The New Corporate Leaders (Simon & Schuster, 1977). In this book Dr. Maccoby lays out four basic archetypes we can generally expect to encounter in the business world:

• The Company Man tends to assume the persona of the corporate culture around him,
• The Craftsman doesn’t really care about for whom he works, but is keenly interested in the quality of his output,
• The Jungle Fighter engages in cloak-and-dagger techniques to advance his career, and very well may present as being technically advanced, but really isn’t, and…
• The Gamesman sees his business environment as something of a game. For this reason he is simultaneously more technically advanced than most, but is also more willing to take risks.

In previous blogs I’ve analyzed not just the implications of encountering these archetypes in the daily interactions of Project Team members, but what the results can be if the entire Project Team – or even macro-organization – were to become dominated by each type. I have personally encountered groups with organizational cultures that mirrored the Maccoby archetypes, and I can state confidently that it’s far better to be led by Gamesmen and Craftsmen than Company Men, or (shudder) Jungle Fighters. In my experience,

• Craftsmen want the job done right, and, if you can demonstrate an ability and willingness to help them achieve that goal, you will fit right in this Project Team. Not only that, but once you arrive and start looking around, you will soon come to the realization that the people around you are pretty talented.
• Dr. Maccoby asserts that Gamesmen are destined to be the most successful archetype, since they’re all about winning, and I agree.

Conversely,

• In those instances where Company Men assume a leadership position, they will invariably employ any and all familiar organizational business model templates to address any problem, no matter how novel. Risk-taking or employing innovative solutions is simply not how these people operate, and the consequences are always organizationally unhealthy, even if they take a long time to unfold.
• Jungle Fighters are the worst. They’ll spend more time trying to build and maintain a façade of expertise than actually exercising actual skill. If these people assume a leadership role, they will create a highly toxic culture, where any challenge to their selected technical approach to the projects’ scope will be portrayed as some kind of personal attack, in dire need of retaliation.

Okay, So What Does All This Have To Do With COVID?

I’m glad you asked. In last week’s blog I discussed how the pandemic has had such a negative, often tragic, and broad-based impact on the macro economy. Going on one year after the first widespread shutdowns began, the cost and schedule performance of the projects making up virtually everybody’s portfolios are available, and some critical organizational behavior and performance information can be gleaned from them.

Let me state plainly that a whole lot of projects were negatively impacted by the pandemic, and even the very best PMs would have been hard-pressed to reduce the severity of such impacts, even by a little. That having been established, there are also portfolios made up of projects with roughly similar scope, but widely divergent outcomes. I’ll approach this using the Game Theorists’ favorite tool, the payoff grid:

The short statements in the payoff grid for Scenarios 1 (A) and 1 (B) are self-explanatory, so let’s look at Scenario 2(A). In the face of failure, Jungle Fighters and Company Men will look to blame something or somebody, but never their own inability to either set the optimal technical agenda, or to properly lead a team of professionals, even in a dramatically changed project environment. If COVID impact offers the most plausible causal element of their troubles, they will reflexively blame it, perhaps not reading my blog from two weeks ago showing how Earned Value Management Systems can be used to pinpoint which projects were genuinely affected by the pandemic, and by how much. By contrast, if the poorly-performing projects were headed by a Craftsman or Gamesman, these PMs will usually try to precisely quantify the effect instead of seeing it as some kind of poor performance license.

I believe that, in the final analysis, Project Teams led by Craftsmen or Gamesmen will show themselves to be more robust in the event of a broadly-negative macro-economic event, while Project Teams “led” by the other Maccoby archetypes will see their vulnerabilities exposed. Now that you know what to look for, seek the former, avoid the latter.

Good luck.