14.6 Procrastination

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Everyone procrastinates and then rationalizes inaction with some pretty amazing excuses, including claims of political acuity. Whatever is in your supervisor's head, however, loses relevance once you have escalated something to them, and nothing appears to be happening - other than the fact that time is perilously slipping away. Your issue could be:

A question of ownership or turf
A purchasing or budgetary item
A basic change in scope where you need the boss's assistance to steer through the maze

Let us hope that you involved your manager in this issue proactively, and thus allowed him or her ample time to obtain a higher-up's blessing, consult his or her spiritual advisor, or get a piece of paper signed. If instead your manager drops the ball, it can cause discord, delay, or even a project jeopardy if the issue is serious enough. I have heard some pretty interesting theories regarding the root cause of procrastination, but the simple fact is that the business world waits for no one. Compounding your exposure is that the boss, in a wily application of the waiting game, sometimes rationalizes procrastination. Unfortunately, this often leads to unpredictable results, because you cannot always be sure which dormant issues will turn hot and ugly at any given moment. In such cases, appropriate, not to mention face-saving intervention may no longer be possible. As a result, working for a procrastinator can be as confusing as working for a micromanager and can yield equally poor results.

On the other hand, you cannot afford to be too much of a nudge with the person who signs your timesheet. Hounding the boss about something he or she clearly does not care to address is not the best impulse to give in to. After years of pounding my own impatient head against this wall, I have come to the conclusion that the boss gets as many (or few) chances as anyone else does on the project before I go to my own Plan B. ^[2] I would no sooner go around my boss to his or her boss than I would let my children play in traffic. I take heart in the knowledge, born from successful experience, that other paths can always be pursued by the politically cornered project manager. Discretion is the key to any remedy you may elect to pursue when you feel compelled to circumvent your nonresponding supervisor. The best approach is to stealthfully engage a team lead's manager, or a critical customer or beneficiary. Perhaps you intimate that both you and your boss are hogtied on this issue and leave open the opportunity for this individual outside your own chain of command to pull a few strings, make a few calls, or even approach your boss with an offer of help, or demand for closure. As with any act of aggression pointing up the food chain, you must be very careful. Be sure that your name appears nowhere along the audit trail this sort of thing creates. Also, I console myself with the knowledge that by the time I push this button, the whole world probably knows where the roadblock is, anyway.

There is always the option of invoking the "it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission" rule. This means you forge ahead with the right action, without the boss's knowledge or blessing. Even I will not take unblessed or politically uncovered moves all that frequently, though, because I need that pay check as much as the next person. So, at certain times, you are just going to be stuck. In that case, I let the team know that the matter has been bumped upstairs and engage them in contingency planning (i.e., next steps to take if the escalation goes for naught). That way everyone knows you have tried to do your job. As I intimated in the Jeopardy section of Chapter 7, some jeopardy situations are actually caused by the boss, or ended up in jeopardy because, for whatever reason, you and the boss failed to share the same sense of urgency regarding an unwanted project development.

^[2]Yes, you may even need a Plan B or two for senior management.

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