Leadership

“Experts in war depend specially on opportunity and expediency.  They do not place the burden of accomplishment specially on their men” – Ch’en Hao

“Now the method of employing men is to use the avaricious and the stupid, the wise and the brave, and I give responsibility to each in situations that suit him.  Do not charge people to do what they cannot do.  Select them and give them responsibilities commensurate with their abilities.” – Chang Yu

So why all the philosophical quotes?  Well I want to talk about an aspect of leadership that is seldom discussed.  What happens when a project goes wrong and the blame starts flying left and right.

In this case (and no I won’t name names) an acquaintance that works at a large company told me about a project she was involved in and how her project leader mismanaged the whole operation from start to finish.  When things started really going bad and the upper management began to take notice the manager started assigning blame left and right but of course never accepted any for himself.

In this case my friend described the project and all the challenges involved, all the tasks that needed to be done and some of the other people involved and it became fairly clear that the project manager had mishandled things primarily by not assigning people the jobs for which they were best suited for.  Senior personnel were given research jobs fit for starting staff and junior staffers were assigned tasks for which they had no training for.

The second error that the project manager committed was not making himself available for consultation and expecting the situation to resolve itself favorably.  When red flags started popping up and things were not going as the schedule demanded the manager failed to heed the warnings and take preventative measures.  He wanted everyone to stick to the original plan.

The last error and really something classless to do was to place the blame on the subordinates and not acknowledge his part in the failure.  By the way that my friend described the events it really sounded as if the project manager really believed that he was blameless.  Luckily the upper management took notice of the chain of events and took appropriate measures but the damage was already done and the project was set back several months and cost the company a lot of money and prestige with their client.

A situation that could have been easily avoided if the project manager had been more conscientious about his management of the project, had been more flexible in his approach but most of all if he had taken an active rather than a passive role in the development of the project.