Mega Egos in Project Business
Oliver F. Lehmann, MSc, ACE, PMP
Project Management Trainer, Project Business Trainer, Founder of the Project Business Foundation
Mostly, people we meet in project business on all sides, such as clients, contractors, subcontractors, and others, are friendly and reasonable people.
Making business with them is joyful and satisfying. They have the sound mix of trustworthiness, ability to listen, empathy, and proficiency that is a prerequisite for doing cross-corporate projects successfully and to the benefit of stakeholders involved. And they have business acumen to ensure that their own commercial interests are respected in their decision making as much as those of other parties involved.
However, there are others.
Research
In preparation for my 2018 book "Project Business Management" (https://www.crcpress.com/9781138197503), I asked project managers in contract projects, how frequently they experienced certain issues as causes of conflicts (on a scale from 1 to 5). Image 1 shows the responses.
Image 1: Frequency of causes of conflicts in Project Business Management
The highest frequency of conflicts was due to diverging business interests of the parties. Not a surprising result. On number 2 were diversity of cultures, legal systems, and moral compasses. This was also not unexpected, as Peter F. Drucker once said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
Surprising was the third place, which was practically a tie with the second: Incompatible egos and anti-social behavior, which inevitably leads to distrust and to communication breakdown in the cross-corporate project. Obviously, there are bullies around in project business, and they threaten to diminish our successes and the results that our sponsors wanted to achieve, when they decided to undertake the project.
Bullies
Bullies do not place completing over competing. They are not able to see a project undertaken by partners instead of parties, and they will never subordinate to a "Mission Success First" paradigm.
We remember them from our time at school. There, certain boys and girls could make life very hard for others. They concealed their lack of ethical education behind noisy and demeaning behavior. They always had friends following them, assuming that this is the safest place to not become victims of the bullies‘ sneering derision and undignifying aggression, and their victims were always the weakest and most vulnerable in the class.
Schoolyard bullies like anyone else grew older and become business bullies. Their behavior may have become more subtle. Some have learned to conceal a knife in a smile, some turn out as bullies only under four eyes; in public, they seem well-behaved and full of team spirit. Others have tried to turn their anti-social behavior into a business benefit, promising to win wars for their principals against competitors, agencies, employees, and others perceived as threatening. As they are prepared to attack almost anyone, mandating them may prove to be a mistake later, when they turn their rage against their boss.
Some bullies went into politics. As in the schoolyard, where they had their fans, they also have them in politics. There will always be people around, who defend their toxic behavior tooth and nail, despite all the damages, that the bullies cause. And again, the bullies' victims will always be the most vulnerable.
Will the problem resolve itself on its own?
While these bullies blow up their egos to finally become mega egos, one would assume that they must burst at one point in time, as a balloon does when it gets blown up too much. However, there is no hope that the mega ego problem will resolve itself.
Protecting Project Business
In project business, we want to do good business for all parties involved. This includes great results for the paying customers, but also profitability for contractors and the protection of their liquidity. The approach to achieve it is called "Good faith", also known as "All for one and one for all" or simply "Win-win".
Mega egos are not able to do that. If something is not first about them, they consider it not worth doing. They reject multilateral agreements and transparent business dealing. They can massively destroy a project.
Once they are in a project under contract, it may be impossible to get them out of it again. With the mutual dependencies that are so typical for project business, they can take down their business partners and lead the entire project into failure.
Mega egos can absorb a lot of management attention across the project supply network. Dealing with them is not only frustrating, it consumes time and energy that would be needed to lead the project to success.
The best solution is to keep mega egos out of the project right from the start.
My recommendation therefore: If you want to do project business with other organizations as contractors or customers, talk with them early and talk with people who have worked with them before. Find out, what drives them to do business: The opportunity to earn money and do good for business partners and the society? Or simple selfishness?
Make sure that you do your project with capable and socially educated partners and do not drive your project into conflicts with mega egos, that can grow and become disastrous conflicts.
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More:
- Article in PM World Journal: "Before You’re Bound Forever…" (https://www.academia.edu/38205601/Before_You_re_Bound_Forever_, free download)
- More articles on project business management: https://liverpool.academia.edu/OliverLehmann
- Book: Project Business Management (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1138197505)
?CEO ?Digital Forensic Investigator (Multimedia) ?Adjunct Associate Professor in Business and Law (ECU) ?International Bestselling Author ?Project, Risk and Contract Management, and Behavioural Specialist
5 年Often a focus on the process (process guides behaviour) helps avoid things becoming personal.
All: In the real world what I call difficult people are everywhere.? I learned from Dr. Michael Johnson (deceased) about how to identify and deal with a variety of difficult people.? We broke them down into several types with distinct characteristics and then suggested effective ways of dealing with the specific type.? It is not a ONE size fits all.? The course was entitled: Working With Difficult People.? I was always careful to remind the students if it seems you are always running into difficult people, maybe the difficult person is YOU!? Just sayin'??
PM Knowledge Translation LLC
5 年Good analysis of the bully mentality. But I take somewhat of an issue with the upbringing.? The most poisonous are those who actually have had the ethical education, have been thoroughly trained in leadership qualities, and seem to have made the personal choice to prefer the attention of their entourage of battered followers kept inline with the bully's plentiful sarcasm, rotating use of borderline kidding at the individuals expense, and deliberately draw the line on support for the project team when it is of no consequence to not take part or it does not fit some self serving personal goal or economics unrelated to the project.? I have seen them all too frequently on projects - they are lazy, disregard attention to detail, do just enough to keep from getting fired, and to the detriment of the project team to which they are assigned (rarely as the PM by the way) always seem to be undergoing the coaching of a manager or higher up who refuses to have the toxic person removed from the project or gainful employment, which rarely creates a lasting and positive result, and when it does only long after the project is complete and has suffered the damage inflicted.? What is worse is the bully will frequently slag the very person who continues to invest in their coaching, in front of their followers as part of their sarcastic spew, spreading the toxicity and exerting their own form of control well beyond the project.
University Professor Emeritus
5 年As I have argued (Oestreicher. 2012), based on the Radical Innovation Theory, the RPV Theory (Christensen et al. 2004) and other explanatory theories, managers tend to be in a triple lock: personal experience, existing organisational resources, processes, and values, and the dilemma of not knowing (e.g., Tversky and Kahnemann, the Theory of the Nervous Frogs), when the time for radical change is essential. This triple lock makes it difficult to start necessary processes in due time, which naturally results in projects (as not done before). I.e., there is the problem of the mega ego but it often is a result to defend a position, which is caused by the triple lock, which equally means that such ego is embedded in what it presently defines as comfort zone: "we perfectly know what we do, our performance is excellent". That this may already be a dead-end road tends to be - consciously or not - then ignored.
Data Quality, Project Management, PMO, and IT. With passion and excellence.
5 年I think this is 100% true for cross company projects! From my experience, it is similar for company internal projects that are cross-department or cross-business-unit. If you don't partner and work together, the project has a problem.