In this first installment of the Dark Side of Project Management, I’ll tackle a thorny practice that can really breed resentment.  My research, and by that I mean five minutes of Googling, indicates that the expression “falling on one’s sword” dates back to the Roman Empire.  Military leaders would literally fall on their sword and commit suicide after an embarrassing defeat.  This was a way of taking responsibility and owning up to their failure.  The phrase is sometimes used in business today and it basically means to apologize, resign over or otherwise take responsibility for an error with a gesture.  The phrase is usually reserved for big screw-ups in my experience.

There’s nothing wrong with owning up to one’s mistakes.  In fact, a PM should always own up to their mistakes.  But this post isn’t about that.  It’s about owning up to others’ mistakes or failures, or put another way accepting blame for others.  This phenomena is in no way unique to PMs.  There are many motivations employees may have for covering for their coworkers.  In the PM world, you’ll see this practice more often when engaging in client-facing projects.  Why?  A PM may be tempted to protect other team members as well as the image of their company.

Project managers, have you experienced any of these situations on a client-facing project?

• A critical project team member is suddenly pulled off time-sensitive work for a support or operational issue and as a result is unable to complete project work by the agreed upon deadline.
• An experienced project team member makes a very rookie mistake, adversely affecting the project.  And by the way, this usually will happen when the team member is forced to do too much multitasking and is unable to focus.
• The client asks for some basic common piece of product or operational documentation and it doesn’t exist.
• A senior leader in your organization has a side conversation with the client and promises something unrealistic related to your project.

If you have experienced any of these or other similar situations, you may have been tempted or felt you had to take one for the team.  What’s worse, a PM does not need to explicitly accept blame to be judged harshly by the client.  Whenever a project does not live up to expectations, in the absence of another explanation, the client will always naturally blame the PM.

If you find yourself looking bad repeatedly due to other team members or organizational shortcomings, it can be career limiting – especially if you intend to stay in the particular industry you are in.  You do not want your reputation to take a hit due to factors beyond your control.  Plus your job satisfaction can’t be very high if you find this happening to you.  So what should you do?

What you should not do is make up fictitious excuses.  This is flat out unethical.  Though I will say I’ve seen some very skillful wordsmiths come up with explanations that downplay a deficiency while not out and out lying.  For example one can make a resource crisis that would look embarrassing sound more like a temporary hiccup: “Unfortunately Joe resigned today (truth).  We’ll just need a couple weeks for another engineer to free up.” when you actually need to hire someone to replace Joe because he’s your only X.  Telling these half truths is also not a good game plan.  It may save your bacon here and there, but if you keep doing it you eventually start to smell like a rat.  And as I indicated earlier, at the end of the day the client will blame you anyway when the project doesn’t go well.  Finding oneself telling a lot of half truths and doing frequent damage control with clients is often the first sign of an endemic problem.

What you should do first is engage your influencing skills and tackle the problem head on.  If you cannot effectively influence the person or people who can rectify the problem, talk with your manager.  Make sure you have concrete facts that demonstrate how your reputation is unjustly taking a hit.  If your manager does not or cannot help, it may be time to update your resume.  I don’t care how much you may be earning, it’s not worth the career hit.  Don’t be shortsighted.  And don’t convince yourself that it’ll eventually get better unless there’s reason to.  That’s being a victim.

In short, don’t make a habit of falling on your sword for others.  You deserve better.  In closing, I want to leave you with something to chew on.  You know all those incompetent vendor PMs you’ve come across over the years?  Could it be that some of them were not in fact incompetent, but rather falling on their sword for others?  Maybe we should try to give them the benefit of the doubt, or at least a little more rope.

Good luck out there PMs!