To really “know” your project, make the project safe for bad news. I’ve adapted the following — from Scott Kirsner’s 2002 Fast Company piece (here) — seven tips on getting bad news in time to do something about it.
- Dead people don’t walk through open doors. I make it very clear that bad news is OK, to the point of encouraging someone who has come to me privately to speak up in a meeting so I can publicly show that it is OK.
- Bad news travels in packs. If any bad news does reach me, it probably is traveling with friends.
- You must have your ways of finding things out. This works two ways: sometimes you need to socialize topics informally, sometimes you need to have an informal network of frontline contacts who don’t report to you directly.
- Join your own organization. This is harder to do in a virtual organization, but try spending time outside your office, hefting boxes at the loading dock or taking calls in the call center.
- Can the canned presentations. We switch up on use of PPTs…sometimes we use them, but sometimes I ask for impromptu updates w/out slides.
- Make bad news legit. The CIA used to have a group of “Team B” analysts provide contrarian, worst-case perspective. Team B’s, however, were “too often” right, so the CIA ended the practice. Learn from that mistake.
- Do something. (More on this later…)
Filed under: Leadership, Organizational Change Management, Performance Management, PMO, Program Management, Project Management, Project Success Factors, Troubled Projects | Tagged: de-escalation, escalation, Fast Company, Scott Kirsner |
Leave a Reply