I was floored this morning when I came across this post about project sponsors. Some choice excerpts:
The problem with project sponsors is that they have got to where they are by climbing a very dirty greasy pole. They now have a privileged aerial view of the executive landscape…. The slightest hint or whiff of them being on the wrong side of an issue, especially if it is your project that is the issue, then it is odds on that you will lose your project patronage…. If we do report the real project status now, it will only lead to investigation and recrimination which will ultimately delay the project anyway. [emphasis added]
In my decades in the corporate world, I have certainly seen my share of execs who fit this description. I’ve also seen at least as many who try their hardest to do the right thing by their teams, their projects, and their company.
Here are a handful of guidelines for project managers dealing with execs:
- If you bring a problem, also bring a suggested solution and some options to go with it.
- Be prepared for deep probing on any issue, not all of which may make sense to you at the time. (As a leader/manager, I would often pull hard on one particular thread of what I was presented, both for my own edification and to see if you knew your stuff. If that thread held, I was likely to accept the rest of your arguments and cut to the request-for-action section. If it didn’t hold, I deeply discounted everything you were offering.)
- Be prepared for the exec to ignore certain areas you think are important; she may know they’re not important, she may already understand them, or she may know that they’re outside her level of competence and is looking to you for an answer, not a dissertation.
- Take responsibility. Don’t point fingers.
- Execs have less do-this-now power that you think they do. If you must ask for something, ask wisely. The best (and easiest) help an exec may offer is an introduction to someone in a different group with whom you want to make contact.
- Virtually all execs believe they got to the executive suite by being smarter and “better” at their job than most everyone else — which is true more often than you may be willing to admit, though it certainly isn’t always true. (Being smarter than 90% of the other folks may or may not make the exec smarter than you… but don’t assume either way.)
- Don’t ever bring to a scheduled meeting a spreadsheet you haven’t triple-checked or a document (or PPT) with grammatical or spelling errors. (For an on-the-fly review, more leeway is given.) The exec wants to be sure you prepared — and cared enough to do your very best — before he contributes his constrained time.
- Half of what managers do isn’t visible to their direct reports; three-quarters isn’t visible at levels beyond that. Just because you can’t see what they’re busy with doesn’t mean they aren’t buried in work. More often that you might suspect, part of that work is providing “air cover” for their teams and your project, if for no other reason than you looking bad makes them look bad.
Finally, one quick clue for spotting an exec who does fit the description in the quote with which I began this article: An exec willing to burn his team by name to his peers or in public. It’s one thing to share, “The Acme Project is late,” or even “The Acme Project team’s been telling me the project will be late.” It’s quite another to say, “The Acme Project team has screwed up,” or –worst of all — “Joe has screwed up” or “The leader of the team has screwed up.” That’s departmental politics in the extreme, avoiding responsibility.Even for an exec new to a department, there’s a big difference between “I know the Acme Project has been late, and I’m going to find out what’s wrong and fix it” and “My predecessor screwed up the Acme Project.”
Exec, grunt, or in between, take responsibility. That’s leadership.
