The Management Genius Of Abraham Lincoln

In her excellent book Team of Rivals, The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster, 2005) Doris Goodwin chronicles how Lincoln defeated Senator and former New York Governor William Seward, Ohio Governor Samual P. Chase, and former Missouri Attorney General Edward Bates to secure the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1860 before she explores how Lincoln would add these very men to his cabinet once he was elected President. The three would serve as Secretary of State, Treasury, and Attorney General, respectively, even though they still held considerable animosity against Lincoln. While Seward would ultimately come to like and respect Lincoln during the American Civil War, Chase was not inclined to do so. Chase would, in fact, conspire against Lincoln to replace him as the Republican nominee in the election of 1864. Nevertheless, Lincoln kept Chase in the cabinet, believing him to be the best man for the job. I can only imagine how difficult it was for Lincoln to sacrifice his political future’s security and personal comfort in keeping a known adversary in his government, simply because of Chase’s capabilities. Goodwin actually quotes Lincoln as saying
We need the strongest men of the party in the Cabinet. We needed to hold our own people together. I had looked the party over and concluded that these were the very strongest men. Then I had no right to deprive the country of their services.[i]
Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…
I remain convinced that one of the most toxic and far-reaching causes of a whole variety of organizational behavior and performance pathologies has to be the neglect (or even abandonment) of the organization pursuing, to the best of its ability, a meritocracy. If your team or group isn’t interested in attracting the most talented people that they can afford, irrespective of their immutable characteristics, then the odds of your team attaining a high-performing level of performance has already taken a hit. The abandonment of sustaining a meritocracy within the macro-organization can take many forms, but I’ll focus on the three that I’ve seen most often, and hold to be the most reliable red flags that this is the case.
Nepotism. This particular path for diverting from a meritocracy is, perhaps, the most understandable of all, given the extent that parents are nominally inclined to sacrifice for their children. An entrepreneur starts a business, sees some level of success, and wishes to share that success with their family members by offering them jobs. But this deviation is plain from the start. If those same children were already employed in appropriately-paying jobs, they should not need additional help well into adulthood. Of course, there are exceptions, and I don’t envy those exceptions. One very capable fellow I worked with happened to be the son of a senior executive, and worked himself very hard indeed, knowing full well that the appearances would point to his not having earned his position on his merits. However, at the same company I also worked with two of the owner’s kids, and they were very poor performers. They knew they could not be fired, or even corrected, and it showed in their work habits. This company, coincidentally (?), had a serious morale problem.
Cronyism. Cliques and clans within the macro-organization are common to the point of being ubiquitous, but that doesn’t make them any less toxic. People who advance within the organization due to their connections instead of actual contributions very much set the stage for Maccoby archetypes[ii] Jungle Fighters and Company Men to advance at the expense of the types that would actually contribute to that organization’s success, Craftsmen and Gamesmen. Once the technical direction gets set by the popular over the talented, the bad decisions accumulate, and the macro-organizational death spiral is likely to follow.
Kiss Up, Punch Down. If you happen to observe this behavior in any of your colleagues or superiors, it’s a sure sign that a deviation from the meritocracy is underway. If one or two people in your organization are given to subtly (or dramatically) acting differently towards others based on whether or not they perceive that this other is in a position to help them professionally, then it might just be an annoyance. But if this type of behavior becomes more common, it means that somewhere, sometimes, this behavior works, otherwise it would have been eliminated through sheer Skinneresque behavioristic no-reward cycles.
To be clear, I am absolutely not recommending that a PMO Director willingly tolerate clear opponents within their management circle. What I am saying is that differences in opinion on matters of determining the optimal technical approach or implementation strategy in advancing PM maturity is NOT a sign of disloyalty. And it doesn’t take the intellectual discipline of an Abraham Lincoln to recognize that.

[i] Goodwin, Doris Kearns, Team of Rivals, The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Simon & Schuster, 2005.
[ii] Maccoby, Michael, The Gamesman, The New Corporate Leaders, Simon & Schuster, 1976.