I've just changed jobs, moving to a project team that seems a lot more focused on tasks than it does on people. Ouch! Why does it seem so hard for project teams to strike a balance between taking care of the work and taking care of the people?
Managing projects has always involved the marriage of sophisticated technology and people. From the earliest days of human history, people have used advanced technology to carry out their projects. Even now, we don't always understand exactly how they did it: Just look at the astonishing astronomical alignments of Stonehenge, the building techniques of the Anasazi cliff dwellers in the southwestern United States and the seemingly magical precision of the Nazca lines in Perú.
But as we increasingly rely on technology, we need to pay correspondingly more attention to the human side of organizations. In his book Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives [Warner Books Inc., 1982], John Naisbitt called it “high tech/high touch.”
Some recent experiences with a troubled project office, however, suggest such balancing of people and tasks is a difficult job indeed.
A Community Lost
Arriving after a series of people-oriented project leaders, the new project manager quickly set a different tone. He scorned meetings and so did everything possible to minimize them. “If we're meeting, we're not doing,” he said, to the initial approbation of meeting-haters throughout the organization. Frequency of meetings dropped from weekly to monthly, and even those were often canceled.
Soon team member turnover increased, helped along by the less-than-friendly style of the new boss. These departures broke some important social bonds, and people responded by staying in their offices a little more. Another early casualty was the office coffee pot—messy and money-losing, it was a popular site for office gossip and disappeared within a month or two. Even the team's language began to change as the new boss brought with him the jargon of his previous assignment, and people followed suit.
These actions had a predictable effect: The strong sense of community developed over many years proved remarkably fragile and was quickly replaced by a culture emphasizing independent effort. Soon people were doing more work from home, relying on e-mail and all the work-sharing tools that project management technology provides. The project's administrative offices became quieter, neater and far emptier, and team members now only stop by every few days.
What's been lost, you ask? Work is still being done, and results seem comparable to those of earlier regimes. The most dispiriting effect seems to be in turnover, as a number of team members have transferred elsewhere in the parent firm. As is often the case, the best performers tend to have the most options, so the ones who departed were in many cases the best and brightest. Certainly, the effect on the morale of those remaining is palpable. Yet it would not be correct to say that the level of conflict has risen. Rather, the main response seems to be withdrawal, a sense of disengagement on the part of many in the project office.
Mr. Naisbitt foresaw all this more than a quarter-century ago. He likened the situation to early predictions about the theater industry, the demise of which was then being widely predicted. After all, with the advent of home entertainment technology, why would anyone choose to pay money to sit in a crowded theater?
“The more technology we introduce into society, the more people will aggregate, will want to be with other people,” he wrote. “Very few people will be willing to stay home all the time and tap out messages to the office. People want to go to the office. People want to be with people.”
Back then, industry took Mr. Naisbitt's ideas to heart and invested billions to attend to the people side of their enterprises. Great cars like the Taurus and Viper spilled out of Ford's and Chrysler's product development centers, in which all members of project teams were housed together, regardless of functional specialty.
The “beanbag chair” culture of early Silicon Valley encouraged informality, creativity and cross-pollination of ideas, and the Skunk Works-style programs of the aerospace industry created designs that shaped the aviation world as we know it today.
But where have we gone since? In today's world of e-mail, video teleconferencing, shareware and telecommuting, project leadership needs to be doing more for the care and feeding of our project teams, not less.
We can start by recognizing that Mr. Naisbitt was right about high tech/high touch. Technology can do miraculous things, but to the extent that it fosters physical or virtual organizational separation, to the extent that we allow it to drive us apart, we are all the worse for it. PM
Bud Baker, PhD, is a professor of management at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, USA. Please send questions for Ask PM Network to [email protected].