PM Station

Workplace Arrogance is a common phenomenon in all organizations. Arrogance is one of those behavioral attribute that hampers workplace relationship development and causes uncomfortable climate, and negative toxic.

 Workplace Arrogance is a demeaning behavior which an individual exhibits in order to establish or demonstrate their superiority over others. This behavior affects the interpersonal relationships, causes increased stress in the employees, in addition to general occupational stress. Stress is the response to a stimulus or stimuli that causes unbalance in the physical and mental equilibrium. And Occupational Stress is the stress that arises due to the mismatch in the capabilities of the individual and that required to complete the work efficiently and effectively. It is so common that how many of us feel that we are better than our peers, almost 80% feel that way, and this is an illusory superiority, Dunning-Kruger effect is an extreme example of the more generic bias illusory superiority

 Actually there’s nothing inherently wrong with everyone being above average. After all, many individuals who had invested time, money and efforts towards their professional development. They weren’t typical of the industry…and in fact, it is highly believable that they are better than their peers in the industry.

However, a tool named WARS (Workplace Arrogance Scale) for measuring employee / manager arrogance introduced by Stanley Silverman and his colleagues from The University of Akron and Michigan State University.

The most important conclusion resulting from their research with WARS was that arrogant employees were usually less intelligent and skilled, although pretended to be superior to others. Their arrogance was thus completely unsubstantiated.

Arrogance turned out to prevail among employees with low self-esteem. This is typical behavior of trying to compensate the lack of confidence.

Silverman and his colleagues discovered less arrogant employees produced better results and vice versa. It became clear that excess arrogance is a significant obstacle for productive work.

Arrogant workers not only performed worse, but made it hard for the rest of the team to maintain friendly, cooperative relationships, at the same time ruining trust and respect.

Silverman’s study also shows that, if tolerated, arrogance can be a highly negative force, draining energy and motivation out of the others and making daily communication unbearable.

Identifying arrogant bosses and avoiding the headaches caused by them can be as simple as answering the below questions included in the WARS test.  A yes to any of the questions signals arrogance in bosses. 

• Does your boss put his/her personal agenda ahead of the organization's agenda?
• Does your boss demonstrate different behaviors with subordinates and supervisors?
• Does the boss discredit others' ideas during meetings and often make them look bad?
• Does your boss reject constructive feedback?
• Does the boss exaggerate his/her superiority and make others feel inferior?

Arrogant bosses often don’t give compliments and mostly condescending, they act like a weasel their concern only about their own neck, they don’t back the team when something goes wrong and they throw people to the wolves

However, encouraging teamwork and humility as well as cultivating a learning-focused culture can lower the degree of arrogance within an organization and contribute to mutually beneficial social interactions between employees and managers.

Now accepting that we all fall victim to the illusion superiority, here are few tips to use the knowledge of illusory superiority to your advantage

• Be actively realistic
• Respond by offering padding
• Embrace failure
• Assume improvement is possible and remember you are not above average in every category

The concepts, methods, and tools for modern quality management are new for most members of functional managers, professionals, and workforce involved during project and after project for operation.

The investment in education and training for project team is very important to achieve high quality within the project and even the rewards are greater after project life cycle.

Record the mistake to track them down and to avoid the repetitive problems in trouble shootings and repair or any faults may be avoided next time.

Solve problems, large improvements are usually the results of interdepartmental or even cross-functional quality improvement teams; those teams tackle the chronic problems that have been in the way of company’s progress for a long time. Those are the vital few problems that create the breakthroughs in quality by reducing waste, minimising bottleneck and improving customer satisfaction dramatically.

Set goals for project team improvement using Juran formula:

Establish specific goals to be reached.

Establish plans for reaching the goals.

Assign clear responsibility for meeting the goals and not to let the team member interpret at their own.

Base the rewards on results achieved, provide recognition.

Report progress of importance here is on the progress expected and the actual progress achieved. Necessary actions to improve the status can be initiated to reduce the variances. Information on the progress also provides the high management the necessary information with confidence towards improvement of activities and further support if required.

Keep score, a Company’s goals are achieved step-by-step, each step taking it nearer to the targeted goals. Further steps to be taken shall involve an action based on the lesson in the previous steps. Tracking the progress and measuring it provides the management of the leverage to control the process.

Communicate results of lesson learnt during the improvement process requires to be shared to create an awareness of the approach taken and the possibility to learn and improve further. It also provides an outlook for people in other areas to the basis for triggering similar improvements in their areas.

Maintain momentum by making annual improvement part of the regular process of the company.

Actions taken in the above steps shall involve the people and sustaining their involvement in improvement activity is a must to achieve the long-term organizational goals and to remain competitive. Juran’s approach focus on people oriented and it places a strong emphasis upon teamwork and a project.

I would also like to mention that to be successful in project management, it is prudent to integrate different methodology according to each situation for example to solve problem; we can use Thomas and Kilmann conflict mode, their approaches to resolve conflict using self-scoring assessment tool to measure one’s preferred method such as competing, collaboration, compromising, and avoiding.

Most problems can be solved when it comes, time to tackle a tough issue by involving the team member, brainstorming, discussing, voting, and asking the expert.

Use Olaf Diegel, a project professional from New Zealand, proposes the use of a creativity breakdown structure:

1. Break up the problem into partitioned tasks
2. Prioritize the partitions
3. Map the dependencies and relationships between individual project pieces
4. Identify the potential problem areas for each segment
5. Assign tasks and resources to address each issue

To craft communication approach that is tailored to the needs of each individual using MBTI Myers Briggs type indicator preference system, so many industries started to use the system in psychometric testing to screen individuals.

I see that most Juran’s ten steps would be implemented to improve an organization by adopting the philosophy of Juran on people so to invest in people, providing them with proper training and skills needed to perform quality job that involves project managers, production team, front line, and maintenance team. All teams work together to produce the high quality products to satisfy the customer needs.

Continuous improvement by apply different methodology in projects to achieve the best result by investing in testing tools to help achieve precisely and accurately measurements of goals.

Monitor measurable KPI tailored to the business needs.

Juran’s point to develop processes, apply written SOP standards of procedures to use during executing the tasks to keep repetitive success and to avoid unnecessary safety incidents.

Giving in recognition and rewards for result oriented team member, have a program in place even for bright ideas there will be a reward, this is similar to Kaizen promotion office for continuous improvement in project management, maintenance and production process control.

The influence of Juran steps contribute to the programme towards achievement of Total Quality Management and six sigma implementations in projects or operation work place.

The effort to convert to lean in most organization is driven from Juran’s teaching and also from other Quality Gurus Deming and Crosby.

Trying Hoshin Kanri planning for policy deployment to get everyone on board proved beneficial

Developing own project team for long term relationship to work on different projects and invest in providing special training and rewarding the team to keep them engaged.

Maintaining a log book to provide tips for newly hired staff, other information can be found through Intranet as an example of PULL communication.

How could PM benefit from Juran’s Trilogy?

1. Quality Planning

1. Establish quality goals
2. Identify who are the customers
3. Determine the needs of the customers
4. Develop product features that response to customer needs
5. Develop processes able to produce the product’s features
6. Establish process controls; transfer the plan to the operating forces

2. Quality Control

1. Evaluate actual performance
2. Compare quality performance with quality goals
3. Act on the difference

3. Quality Improvement

1. Prove the need
2. Establish the infrastructure
3. Identify the improvement projects
4. Establish projects team
5. Provide the team with resources, training, motivation to diagnose the causes, and hence, stimulate remedies
6. Establish control to hold the gains

I would like to mention that the urge for Quality is a basic of human beings since the beginning when man started to hunt and looked for best fruit to eat to avoid the poisonous one and the development of inspection and inspectors also belongs to ancient time of Egyptians tombs using measurement during stone construction.

Early forms of protection for Safety and Health of the Citizens started at the time of the code of Hammurabi 2000 B.C. prescribed the death penalty for any builder of a house that later collapsed and killed the owner ” An eye for an eye.” In medieval times, the same fate awaited the baker who inadvertently had mixed rat poison with flour.

Therefore, since then Government involvement in managing Quality has been initiated by establishing different institutions to protect customers like written warranties and set a standard for Quality like CSA, OSHA, and Occupational Health & Safety, NFPA, ANSI,UL, ASTM, IEEE, NETA, and so on.

These institutions set a minimum acceptable standard but organization can raise their standard beyond that and increase the level of threshold triggers

 First two points of providing features for products which meets customer requirement and with zero deficiency. I see that as project management team, we provide a service to the customers whether they are receiving/singing off the products or services or they are the end user of the products or services 

Our deliverable as to ensure reliability of products or services as per designed so that the production of the project can benefit from high technology and highly calibrated tools for precise testing of quality requirements. This can be carried out after the life cycle of the project into the life cycle of the products for example if the project is to build a factory to produce a consumable products. The focus is to ensure all activities and materials equipment used during the project will produce the quality planned and last for the life cycle of the products.

Zero deficiency also applied in project activities because rework will cost more and will require more shutdown of machinery to do the rework which means increase in duration and can cause the project to fall behind schedule.

A.         Quality Planning for project management

1.         Establish quality goals: to provide highest skilled services for customers

2.         Identify who are the customers/ all stakeholders functional departments who will operate  the project after

3.         Determine the needs of the customers: reliability, availability of equipment/ Services

4.         Develop product features that response to customer needs: techniques to maintain uptime and reliability for the project objectives

5.         Develop processes able to produce the product’s features: provide training to enhance the skills of project team, invest in high end testing tools to measure your quality.

6.         Establish process controls; transfer the plan to the operating forces: develop team and manage team to ensure all methodology and tactics applied, update lessons learnt from previous mistakes, and troubleshooting/ trace out faults for future references

B.         Quality Control for project management

1.         Evaluate actual performance: establish baseline to check for variances

2.         Compare quality performance with quality goals: check the project team actual KPI against the pre-set target for example the number of incidents, team velocity, uptime percentage, work flow, and efficient time consumed to perform quality rework if occurs.

3.         Act on the difference: correct the variance between actual and planned targets, and record solution activities for future

C.        Quality Improvement for project team from Juran ten steps

Always there is a need for finding the best solution, therefore, builds awareness of needs and opportunities by identifying the improvements techniques, establishing project team and provide the team with resources.

Training and motivation to diagnose the causes, stimulates the remedies, designate facilitators, the importance of training for company which has been actively engaged in moving towards TQM in the past few years, they know the importance of education and training. To continue reading please check Part 2

The concepts, methods, and tools for modern quality management are new for most members of functional managers, professionals, and workforce involved during project and after project for operation.

The investment in education and training for project team is very important to achieve high quality within the project and even the rewards are greater after project life cycle.

Record the mistake to track them down and to avoid the repetitive problems in trouble shootings and repair or any faults may be avoided next time.

Solve problems, large improvements are usually the results of interdepartmental or even cross-functional quality improvement teams; those teams tackle the chronic problems that have been in the way of company’s progress for a long time. Those are the vital few problems that create the breakthroughs in quality by reducing waste, minimising bottleneck and improving customer satisfaction dramatically.

Set goals for project team improvement using Juran formula:

Establish specific goals to be reached.

Establish plans for reaching the goals.

Assign clear responsibility for meeting the goals and not to let the team member interpret at their own.

Base the rewards on results achieved, provide recognition.

Report progress of importance here is on the progress expected and the actual progress achieved. Necessary actions to improve the status can be initiated to reduce the variances. Information on the progress also provides the high management the necessary information with confidence towards improvement of activities and further support if required.

Keep score, a Company’s goals are achieved step-by-step, each step taking it nearer to the targeted goals. Further steps to be taken shall involve an action based on the lesson in the previous steps. Tracking the progress and measuring it provides the management of the leverage to control the process.

Communicate results of lesson learnt during the improvement process requires to be shared to create an awareness of the approach taken and the possibility to learn and improve further. It also provides an outlook for people in other areas to the basis for triggering similar improvements in their areas.

Maintain momentum by making annual improvement part of the regular process of the company.

Actions taken in the above steps shall involve the people and sustaining their involvement in improvement activity is a must to achieve the long-term organizational goals and to remain competitive. Juran’s approach focus on people oriented and it places a strong emphasis upon teamwork and a project.

I would also like to mention that to be successful in project management, it is prudent to integrate different methodology according to each situation for example to solve problem; we can use Thomas and Kilmann conflict mode, their approaches to resolve conflict using self-scoring assessment tool to measure one’s preferred method such as competing, collaboration, compromising, and avoiding.

Most problems can be solved when it comes, time to tackle a tough issue by involving the team member, brainstorming, discussing, voting, and asking the expert.

Use Olaf Diegel, a project professional from New Zealand, proposes the use of a creativity breakdown structure:

1. Break up the problem into partitioned tasks
2. Prioritize the partitions
3. Map the dependencies and relationships between individual project pieces
4. Identify the potential problem areas for each segment
5. Assign tasks and resources to address each issue

To craft communication approach that is tailored to the needs of each individual using MBTI Myers Briggs type indicator preference system, so many industries started to use the system in psychometric testing to screen individuals.

I see that most Juran’s ten steps would be implemented to improve an organization by adopting the philosophy of Juran on people so to invest in people, providing them with proper training and skills needed to perform quality job that involves project managers, production team, front line, and maintenance team. All teams work together to produce the high quality products to satisfy the customer needs.

Continuous improvement by apply different methodology in projects to achieve the best result by investing in testing tools to help achieve precisely and accurately measurements of goals.

Monitor measurable KPI tailored to the business needs.

Juran’s point to develop processes, apply written SOP standards of procedures to use during executing the tasks to keep repetitive success and to avoid unnecessary safety incidents.

Giving in recognition and rewards for result oriented team member, have a program in place even for bright ideas there will be a reward, this is similar to Kaizen promotion office for continuous improvement in project management, maintenance and production process control.

The influence of Juran steps contribute to the programme towards achievement of Total Quality Management and six sigma implementations in projects or operation work place.

The effort to convert to lean in most organization is driven from Juran’s teaching and also from other Quality Gurus Deming and Crosby.

Trying Hoshin Kanri planning for policy deployment to get everyone on board proved beneficial

Developing own project team for long term relationship to work on different projects and invest in providing special training and rewarding the team to keep them engaged.

Maintaining a log book to provide tips for newly hired staff, other information can be found through Intranet as an example of PULL communication.

One should not be confused between Business model and operation model, the business model is about value proposition and how effectively commercialize, increase profit by revenue from products or services to the customers it helps the organization to evaluate in time of ecosystem what the organization must do and what it must change to maintain sustainability, but the operating model might looks less attractive apparently however one cannot ignore the importance of having the right one, the operating model is part of execution life cycle of the strategy framework because it support the strategic priorities and ensure the organization works effectively defining what matter most starting with design principles for strategic requirements, focus on the specific sources of value to the business, the operating model would help to make it easier decide on important critical decisions, defines scope and boundaries reflecting opportunities for customers, support a repeatable product design process that balances customer requirements and technical feasibility, articulate organizational strengths by making it easier for distributers to do business with the organization to reach out larger market, clarifying the role of the centre leveraging scales and expertise for example any unit generate more than 80% of the demand for shared services will have responsibility to manage that service.
With increasing customer expectations for more tailored services, a growing model called SOMS (service operating model skills) to deliver more value to the customers.
The operating model is the link and serves as the bridge between strategy and execution, like tools & techniques between Input & output; to simplify further, let’s use the example of two cars racing one car with not perfect operating engines but driven by the fastest driver (A) the other one has an almost perfect operating engine but driven by an ordinary driver (B) in the final race result, the fastest driver did not win!, the ordinary driver won the race because he was equipped with a better functioning system with all data, processes and people to complete the capability package where the fastest driver suffered from mechanical failure (not his fault) but the operating model package he has was inferior therefore a winning operating model is needed to convert strategy to successful results.
The future model is TOM (Target Operating Model); this one is hard to achieve because the operating model itself must develop transformation effort in the form of programs of changes; unless the changes are for the right reasons, it won’t be worth it. A few steps are needed to reach the target operating model addressing why the mission model, what business model the organization have, how the value model analyzes, moving from the current operating model to the transformation model must be knowing when to do that to reach the final TOM.