Читать книгу Project Management For Dummies - Stanley E. Portny - Страница 39

Impartial, objective decisions based on facts and data, not on opinions, are the cornerstone of a fair project, project team, and work environment. We share with you that most decisions will be met with acceptance by some and resistance by others. It’s rare that you’ll have the opportunity to make impactful decisions that provide only positive outcomes for everyone involved. With that said, decisions are significantly easier to accept, whether they benefit you or not, if they are made and communicated in a fair and equitable manner.

Imagine you are working on a project (as an individual contributor, not the project manager) with a team of engineers, quality assurance specialists, and a project manager to design and build a new high-tech widget. Now, let’s assume that the project manager, Tanya, has been employed by your organization for over ten years and her son, Zack, is an intern serving as one of the engineers assigned to the project. Tanya routinely overrules you and the other engineers in favor of Zack’s ideas for the widget’s design, even though not one of his ideas has yet to work, and she rarely provides any explanation for overruling the more senior engineers for Zack’s ideas.

Tanya’s nepotism towards Zack is unfair and demotivating to others involved with the project and can be detrimental to the project’s overall success. This particular scenario can be tricky, though, because we don’t want to openly call out Zack each time his ideas are considered over everyone else’s (that would only serve to shame Zack with no beneficial outcome, especially since it isn’t Zack’s fault that Tanya continually favors only his ideas). Nor do we want to blatantly accuse Tanya of favoring her son despite the availability of objectively better ideas on multiple occasions from numerous team members (doing so could cause Tanya to become defensive or, worse yet, to dig in and continue to show favoritism toward Zack).

After the first couple demonstrations of such egregious unfairness, most rational team members would begin to become disillusioned and disinterested in providing meaningful contributions. They would understandably learn to expect that Tanya will continue to disregard their inputs in favor of Zack’s, without justification. Unfairness can become toxic to a project team, eventually resulting in a lack of trust of the project manager, which is very difficult to rebuild, and resentment.

By the way, if you do find yourself in a situation where someone shows obvious favoritism or otherwise flawed decision-making, as with Tanya in the previous example, keep the following in mind to avoid the perception that you’re accusing or attacking:

 Be objective: People can become understandably irrational when considering family and other personal matters. Rather than pointing fingers and blaming Tanya for favoring Zack, stick to the facts of specific situations where certain ideas were overlooked in favor of Zack’s idea. Describe the results of such decisions (why Zack’s idea didn’t work out and why you believe one or more of the overlooked ideas would have been worth pursuing instead).

 Don’t be selfish: Your concern for the project team, the client, your organization’s leadership, and for all the other project stakeholders, as well as the project’s ultimate success or failure, are all excellent reasons to be concerned that favoritism or other unfair practices may have a negative impact. Be sure to separate, from your discussion with Tanya, any feelings of personal resentment or frustration. This won’t help present your most effective argument for ending the unfair practice (facts and data are almost always more difficult to write off than a feeling or opinion).