this complex set of code - Vijay, Srinivas, Sanjay, Mahesh, Brett and myself. There is a lot of friction and I find it hard to hold this team together. Vijay vanished for a couple weeks. Once he finally showed up I convinced him to do a code review on Brett's code. The result was sadly predictable. The code is amateurish. Vijay politely explained that there were better ways to get the same result and tried to mentor Brett. Brett assured Vijay that he already knows the answers and does not need advice. Vijay persisted and convinced Brett to re-write his code. Vijay left the meeting frustrated and did not return again for nearly a month. Nor would he again participate in a code review. Vijay holds me responsible for the results, will not allow me to replace Brett and will not allow me to remove Brett from the project. I am the one to blame for this mess.
I, in turn, blame Vijay for not allowing me to fix the situation and I blame Brett for the results.
Luke has also grown tired of the situation and has asked me to remove Brett from the project, but I cannot. So Luke blames me for the arguments and slow rate of progress. Mahesh barely speaks to Brett and Srinivas has begun to complain to me as well. None of this is helpful. Brett is here for the duration of the project, whether we like it or not. We are all either going to get along or we will utterly and completely fail.
I am trying to mentor Mahesh. I reminded Srinivas and Sanjay that I am the sole point of contact for their work assignments. I keep sending emails to Vijay and I leave messages for him. And then I do my very best to be a real and present person while working with Brett. This is hard work. If I pretend to want to work with Brett while deeply hoping he will fail then my true intent will be transparent. Instead I must put myself into a mental state of desiring to help. Here I borrow from what I have learned in working with the homeless. I do not confront the discontinuity between their explanation of reality and my perception of the same. I do my best to instead see reality from their point of view. I am trying my best to see reality from Brett's point of view.
Meanwhile, however, the deadline is nearing and Luke is beginning to worry. The Arbinger Institute has an interesting concept that explains how our actions trigger our sense of frustration with others. (Arbinger Institute) Basically, Luke now fears that his decision to give us half a resource instead of the two resources we asked for was wrong. He fears that his action is now going to cause us to fail and thus there is a sense of guilt. Rather than absorb that sense of guilt, Luke looks around to find the person that causes him to feel this way. Then he projects that feeling onto the person who causes him to feel guilty. Thus, Luke has now adopted the point of view that it is my fault that I did not hire enough people.
This finally came out one day when he could no longer contain his hostility toward me. He asked me to stay behind after one of my status meetings. Then he explained to me that his company has lots of money and that we should have asked for more money so that we could have hired more people. I reminded him that we had asked for more people but he denied that I had done so. He then told me that he is disappointed that Brett is not the expert we had promised. I sympathized with him but reminded him that with the updates I have made to the schedule we are still projected to finish on time and on budget. He then told me that it is my fault that this project is failing. I assured him that it is not failing. It degenerated from there and again he reminded me that project managers do not do anything of value. I attempted to salvage the situation but I am truly frustrated. I sense that Luke is afraid he will lose his job if this project fails. I sense that Luke is afraid to tell his boss that he withheld funding when we asked for it. And I sense that I am now to be the scapegoat for what Luke believes is going to be a catastrophe.
The Arbinger concept of self-deception says that I first choose to act in a way that I know is short of what I could have done. This makes me feel guilty. Then I project that guilt onto those around me. They sense my attitude toward them and they treat me accordingly. This then spirals into chaos. My project is on the edge of collapse into destructive conflict. It is important that I not reciprocate Luke's projections. Instead, I feel sorry that he lives in fear. Personally, I completely sympathize with him. I also feel like my career with this company will end if this project fails. The difference is that I, like Manny, only consider each job to be a brief stop on my journey. We are all going to die anyway. What matters is what we do with the brief span of time we are given.
As for Brett, the reason he behaves like he does is three fold. First, he has gotten away with it all his life and is going to get away with it here as well. Second, he makes a lot more money than any of the rest of us even though he is the youngest person on the team. He does that because he projects himself as being massively superior to the rest of us. Deep down I think he knows that his behavior is a product of those two tributaries. What I do not think he realizes, however, is that he may well have been an expert in relation to other people on other projects, but here he is dealing with people who in a few months have surpassed him.
I took some time and went over to see Greg. I gave him a candid update and told him just how fragile the team is and how great the risk is that we might not finish on time. We then talked about Luke's fears and his use of me as a scapegoat. Greg told me he is running into exactly the same issue now on another project where that customer has decided that all the past successes were due to their talent and the current difficulties are entirely Greg's fault. It does not matter that all of the coding on all of those efforts were performed by our programmers, not theirs. It does not matter that we have had the same project manager in place for almost two years and he is the person responsible for all the good results so far. Instead, all of the good is now credited to the wisdom of the customer and all of the bad is attributed to Greg. Scapegoating is a very popular practice among people who live in fear. Ultimately the deaths of Jesus, Gandhi and King are all the result of people who were afraid of what might be. Poor souls projected their internal fears onto those three saints and killed them rather than confront their own internal demons. This is human nature. We cannot tolerate internal dissonance and so we display external antagonism.
The next several weeks became intense. As a team we worked a lot of twelve hour days. Mahesh found solutions to numerous problems. Srinivas took over as the subject matter expert and found solutions for the problems that Mahesh did not have time to deal with. Vijay started responding to some of my emails and offered technical advice on a few key issues. And Brett was progressing. I had given about a quarter of Brett’s work to Mahesh and another quarter to Srinivas. That left the load balanced so that our expert, Brett, was finally able to keep up with the new hires. We never got out of the "storming" stage of team formation. There were more arguments including one spectacular one on a day when I was off at another site.
And then one day we finished.
Lessons Learned
We missed the go-live deadline by four hours on a five month project. We came in $300 below on a $300,000 budget. I felt like this was a fantastic triumph. We missed the budget by 0.1% on the plus side and the time by 0.5% on the negative side. Considering how close we came to total failure, finishing at all was remarkable. And finishing that close to the baseline was amazing.
Luke, however, was furious about both us taking too long and not spending as much as was budgeted. I called Vijay and Greg to warn them that Luke was going ballistic. I also told them, however, to just give it a week and he would calm down.
The following week Mahesh and I were invited to the quarterly meeting for the division. The division executive talked about some of the big efforts underway and then he introduced Luke. Luke gave a presentation describing the success of his project and then he asked Mahesh, Kathy and me to stand up and be recognized. Out of our band of six scapegoats Mahesh and I were the only two present so I sent a nice thank you email to the rest of the team and copied Greg and Greg's boss. I included a good description of the praise that the division executive had for our team and our company. Both Greg and his boss respon
ded with praise for the team.
The contract was extended for twelve more months. And with that I had finished my work. I had demonstrated that we could deliver using a mixture of on-site and offshore programmers. Soon Greg sent me off to another customer. Brett learned to ask Mahesh for advice, though he seldom used it, and then he too was transferred to another customer. Mahesh took over from there and will run the project going forward. The key lessons that I learned from this project can be summarized in three points:
--
We must consciously choose to either inflame the chaos or absorb the insults and dampen the antagonism.
If we can hold the chaos in check we can create dissonance that will change people.
If we find a way to help people change we just might finish the project.
--
Bibliography
Arbinger Institute; Leadership and Self-Deception; BBC Audio; ISBN 9-781572704442.
Brooks Adams; Theory of Social Revolutions; MacMillan; 1913.
Carl R. Rogers; On Becoming a Person; Houghton Mifflin; 1961; ISBN 0-395-08409-1.
Charles Darwin; On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Workplace Ecology: A Case Study in Project Management Page 11
