The Tale of the Poor PM

“Ram, we need to talk, I am setting up a meeting”, said Tina, head of the HR team. Ram, Project Manager in a multi-national company was not sure about the agenda of this sudden meeting, but he joined the meeting.

Tina started, “Ram, I was having a skip level HR meeting with your team members and heard some complaints about your way of managing people. The team is upset about your command-and-control style and they feel that this approach has no place in Agile environment, so please change it”. Ram was furious after hearing the feedback and tried to justify that he was just ensuring that the project stays on track and pushing people to meet the deadlines. But Tina was in no mood to take any risk with the team’s concerns. Reluctantly, Ram agreed to change his behavior and to demonstrate Servant Leadership going forward.

Couple of weeks later Tina saw Ram in the office lobby and asked him how the things are going. Ram said, “Tina, your recommendation to become a Servant Leader completely messed up my life. Now no one listens to me. People are late for standup, they don’t update Jira, the stories are spilling over and boss is mad at me”. Tina felt bad for him and said, “Ram, let me tell you story of a snake that stopped biting, I hope you will get a clue from it”.

Once upon a time, in small village lived a snake who used to attack and bite people. All the villagers and especially children were frustrated with the snake and requested a holy man to control the snake. The holy man met and commanded the snake to stop biting villagers or else he would be cursed. The snake promised the holy man that he will not attack the villagers anymore.

After few weeks, when the holy man saw the same snake, he was surprised to see the wounded & weak snake. He realized that people are no more afraid of him and attacking him with stones. After seeing this, the holy man said to the snake, “I asked you not to bite but I didn’t prevent you from hissing. You need to understand the difference between biting and hissing.”

Tina continued, “Ram, self-managed teams would be more motivated and hence would deliver better results than the ones controlled by ‘Dictator PM/Scrum Master’. But that does not mean we abolish all the leaders, processes and guidelines. We need to ensure that there is team empowerment along with inspect & adapt mechanism which is focused on the project objectives”. Ram got the message.

Friends, have you observed such a dilemma in your work environment? How do you balance between two extremes - Teams led by an autocrat vs. Leaderless crowd? Have you seen examples where a leader just hissed but did not bite?

PMTantra?- Wisdom through Stories!