14.5 Your Manager s Political Tendencies

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14.5 Your Manager's Political Tendencies

Many information technology (IT) project managers have a technical background, and thus are likely to be suspicious of, if not unskilled at office politics. It is equally probable that your manager is immersed in internal politics, perhaps to the practical exclusion of everything else. When you find yourself confused by the prima facia evidence of corporate politics, keep in mind what is probably going on, because that makes it easier to understand why certain decisions are made, alliances struck, or issues ignored. Organizational politics spin around people jockeying to get as close as possible to the perceived nucleus of power and to stay there. That basis is really no more sophisticated than high school cliques. The trappings certainly are, and the more successful players are often, but not always, far more adept at disguising their motives than the adolescent in-crowd.

The upshot is that the chief goal of a politically motivated boss is to cultivate an upwardly visible reputation of defect-free performance and incredible managerial skill. Just like an elected public official does not want morals charges on his record, your boss does not cherish having the reputation of overseeing untidy or disastrous projects. Chances are excellent that the people higher up the corporate ladder than your boss probably understand the roller coaster nature of big, complex projects even less. As a result, this turns into a game where mistakes and controversy are glossed over, or stuck in the back pocket of some unsuspecting competitor or fall guy. By the way, project managers are organizationally well suited as sacrificial lambs, so this scapegoat could turn out to be you!

Even the most sincere senior manager is prone to this self-protective behavior. Although you cannot guarantee that the scent of pending disaster will not waft from your cubicle up toward the penthouse, you need to understand that your boss's intervention into your working world will most likely be motivated by the desire to quell bad press reflecting negatively on him, not you or the project. I hope you will agree that this does not necessarily accomplish the same as fixing the problem. In fact, from a project perspective, this intervention from above may be as helpful as pouring gasoline on a fire, despite your supervisor's belief that this intervention is politically astute and necessary.

Some IT projects are ugly during implementation, even those that are run well and bound for glory. Beneficiaries may leverage the bad aura of the moment to launch complaints, however, knowing full well your manager, who feels politically vulnerable to this presumably short-lived bad karma, will blow them out of proportion. I have seen beneficiaries do this even when they risk exposing deficiencies in their own organization. Finger pointing has an element of brinksmanship to it, in that these brazen ones are taking a calculated risk that those who they criticize are too genteel, passive, or timid to respond in kind. You may also want to consider that there is no guarantee that senior managers are consistently lucid or clever. People do illogical things when they smell the blood of a wounded competitor, or fear their own demise.

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