On Loyalty Versus Talent

 

I think I will add a new entry to Hatfield’s Incontrovertible Rules of Management that reads:

A plurality, if not a majority, of business model pathologies have their roots in deficiencies of character.

For example, consider Chesterton’s Fence. The notion that someone would have to articulate that it’s a bad idea for a new property owner, upon discovery of a fence in the middle of that property that did not fulfill any intuitive function, have that fence torn down has nothing to do with any theory of optimal property sub-division. Rather, it addresses a tendency of human nature to act before having the relevant information associated with those kinds of decisions which, in turn, come from the character deficiencies of impatience and arrogance.

When it comes to creating anew or replacing existing upper management within the Project Management Office, one common business model pathology I have witnessed has the tendency to create barriers to eventual PMO success, and is addressed in Hatfield’s Incontrovertible Rules of Management #12, which reads:

In large-scale re-orgs, particularly one where two (or more) groups are being merged, employees displaying the highest level of loyalty to new management tend to be rewarded more generously than the most talented members.

In other words, loyalty, not talent, is the coin of the realm in new or re-organized Teams in general, and PMOs in particular.  Writing along similar lines, Nicolo Machiavelli stated “The conqueror does not want doubtful friends who will not aid him in the time of difficulty…”[i] Of course, Machiavelli was writing about the highly politically-charged and violent nature of 15^th Century Italian city-states, but I’ve found some of his writings to be applicable to the organizational behavior and performance characteristics of corporations.

When we combine this effect with those instances where the new PMO management is seeking to either introduce a new technical approach to advancing the organization’s capability maturity, or significantly altering the existing one, we have the following payoff grid:

Every new PMO Director hopes for Scenario B, and may even believe themselves there even as evidence of one of the other Scenarios mounts. But, if the PMO Director has selected a poor technical approach to the advancing-PM-capability problem, then the last thing he would want to see is a staff who either doesn’t recognize its deficiencies, or is willing to declare loyalty to an approach they know to be flawed (Scenario A), which is why Scenario C is the next-best one.

The problem being illustrated by the above payoff grid is not that of a disloyal staff needing to be marginalized, but that of the new PMO leadership automatically assuming that their new/modified technical approach is the optimal one. For if the PMO leadership does not arrogate to itself the presumption of being right 100% of the time with respect to the selected technical agenda, they would be open to the benefits of arriving in Scenario C, recognizing that it is vastly superior to Scenario A. Scenario C carries with it the implication that the PMO leadership can course-correct in time to attain some demonstrable level of PM capability maturity before the macro-organization’s executives become disappointed, whereas becoming enmired in Scenario A points to a path that eventually delivers a situation where the PMO director is comfortable and confident, all the way up to the point that their prioritization of loyalty over talent precipitates an erosion (if not collapse) of the very organizational support needed to maintain their under-performing PMO.

And, while all of these pressures stem from a fear of the PMO Director finding herself in Scenario D, I must admit that, even though it looms larger than it should, the possibility of the existing PMO staff refusing to support a new, demonstrably superior technical approach cannot be ignored. But if we assume that the Maccoby[ii] archetypes of the Gamesman and the Craftsman would typically recognize a superior technical approach when they see it, and the Company Man will usually accept the trajectory of the organization around him, then that leaves only…

That’s right, the Jungle Fighter. It’s the presence of Jungle Fighters within the Team that dramatically increase the odds of the new PMO Director finding himself in Scenario D. What we have here, essentially, is the worst type of Maccoby archetype driving an artificial inflation of the perceived value of the oleaginous loyal over the truly advanced-in-PM members of the PMO which, in turn, significantly lower the odds of the discovery or successful implementation of the best technical approach to attaining the PMO’s goals. So, new PMO Director, before you replace the existing Team’s more advanced members with those who strike you as being more trustworthy, think twice.

Unless the existing people are risk managers. Feel free to immediately send them to someone else’s Program Office.

[i] Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince, retrieved from https://effectiviology.com/strategy-lessons-from-machiavelli-the-prince/ on January 26, 2024, 17:32 MST.

[ii] Maccoby, Michael, The Gamesman, The New Corporate Leaders, Simon & Schuster, 1976.