that we would need to find other customers that would also pay him or her part time so that he or she would get a full paycheck every week. After a few days of haggling we agreed on a price and schedule. Meanwhile I was busy documenting the design and seeking ways to trim the scope and schedule to match our resources.
About ten days later our staffing team found a possible candidate for our half-time position. Vijay talked with him first and said that he seems to be an expert in this programming language, but he is a bit argumentative. Vijay noted, however, that experts of this caliber are often rather opinionated. This is both useful information and damaging information in that it prejudiced my own interview. The candidate's name is Brett. Greg and I did a phone interview with him a few days later. I found him to be argumentative, but he seemed knowledgeable. We need someone who is knowledgeable and can probably live with a bit of conflict if it is for a brief duration.
Three weeks later Brett showed up and I gave him his first work assignment. After a few hours I checked to see if he had access to the right systems and if the goals seemed clear. Later that day I asked if he had been able to read through our design document and asked if he understood what needed to be done. Brett explained that he was not going to read our documents and had already started coding. This distressed me because it had taken weeks of negotiation with Luke to get the subtleties of what was required down on paper. I probed to see if he understood the complexity of the requirements and found that he did not. I asked for an explanation about the code he had already written and found that he was coding based on assumptions that were not valid. Eventually I convinced him to glance through the design document and then use it as a reference on this project.
During the remainder of that week I checked with Brett and Mahesh a couple times a day to ensure we were getting things done on schedule. I continued the daily conference calls with Srinivas and Sanjay and used emails to coordinate the offshore and on-site efforts. This was a significant effort and we did not have enough staffing or time to do anything twice. I also worked with other project managers to find work for Brett so that he could spend half of his time on our project and half of his time with another customer.
Early in the second week there was an argument between Brett and Mahesh. I took them into a conference room and mediated. I asked each to explain their perspective. Brett explained his view while Mahesh listened. Mahesh started to explain his view and Brett stopped him and told him he was wrong. I explained that the rule for this process is that each person gets to explain their view before we begin the discussion. I asked Mahesh to continue and Brett again stopped the conversation. I explained again that we had given Brett a turn to speak and now we were going to give Mahesh a turn to speak. We tried a third time and failed again. It is my goal in these situations to dampen the antagonism and get people back to polite discussion. Since the first tactic was not working I suggested we instead move ahead to the discussion of approaches. I offered to let Brett go first and he succinctly told us that we either do it his way or our project will fail. Mahesh reminded Brett that we had already spent time on the proof of concept project and had already solved the key issues that Brett said were pertinent. The discussion degenerated from there rather quickly and I asked Mahesh to leave while I discussed this with Brett.
This was the first of many confrontations with Brett. I told him that we had already pooled the knowledge of Vijay, Srinivas and Mahesh, explored the literature on the internet and scoured through the books that Vijay, Srinivas and Mahesh had purchased. We had code that now worked and all we needed Brett to do was expand on that code base in order to meet the additional requirements defined by Luke. He refused. I told him to stop work on that task and proceed to the next task on his list while I discussed this with Vijay. I also told him that arguments like this were not acceptable.
I called Vijay, explained the situation and suggested that first, Brett is not the expert that we thought he was and second that these types of arguments cannot be allowed to occur within six feet of Luke's cube. Vijay assured me that I was over-reacting and promised to get back to me next week. Brett then called Vijay and explained that I was giving him bad advice and told Vijay that he needed to do something about this. Vijay promised Brett that he would get back to him next week. We are at a standoff. Both of us know that Vijay is not going to get back to us.
I sometimes volunteer to work with homeless people. The key thing I have learned from that experience is that we all isolate ourselves from reality. One of my homeless friends is named Tommy. Tommy tells those he meets that he is a wealthy businessman who is dressed casual so as not to attract attention while he explores the neighborhood for a business expansion. This is his outer personae. If you penetrate that layer you next learn that Tommy is an out-of-luck businessman searching the neighborhood for a location that can use his skills. If you persist, then over a matter of months you will learn that Tommy was a successful businessman, has spent time working for other businessmen and is now frustrated by his inability to get the type of job he wants. Now, if you have patience you will learn that Tommy has gone through several jobs in the past few months and has a hard time holding onto a job because he tends to get angry when he does not get his way. If you can stay in touch with Tommy long enough you will learn that Tommy gets angry because he often ends up in prison when he gets into a fight with someone he works with and thus he does not trust the people that he works with because they might send him back to prison. Layers upon layers of projections all designed to protect the person who Tommy really is. There are so many layers, in fact, that I still do not know Tommy. Nor do I know Brett.
The key difference, however, is that I volunteer to work with Tommy but it is my budget that is paying Brett. When it is my personal money that helps Tommy find a place to stay for the night, then I do not expect anything in return. Somehow, however, when it is my customer's money that pays Brett then I expect him to do what we are paying him to do. Another key point is the impact on the ecology. If I help Tommy get off the street and into a job then it seems to me like the world is a better place. What, however, would I think if I was the employer that hired Tommy and then found him threatening to hit one of his customers? In that situation the priority is to protect the ecology of that work place and remove Tommy. Here I am in a dilemma. How can I improve the ecology of this work place when the people who shape this ecology are not getting along?
My first reaction was an appeal to Vijay that was rebuffed. My next strategy is to "turn the other cheek". I will accept Brett as an expert who is opinionated and try to change the work assignments to avoid overlaps between him and Mahesh. It will be my goal to find Brett's strengths and help him focus on those areas. At the same time, however, I hope to show him alternatives. Perhaps he can learn if he understands that Mahesh is succeeding even while taking an approach that Brett rejects. After all, that was my approach with Luke. I allowed him to continue to tell us that offshore development never worked even as he moved the results of that effort into production.
The goal of that approach is internal dissonance. The Bible contains several references to a building block that was rejected. In brief, the quarry workers selected the very best stone and sent it to the building site to use as the stone that would have the most visibility. When it arrived, the number on that stone did not match any of the numbers that the workers were looking for so the stone was rejected. People continued to stumble over this discarded stone as the work continued. Finally, only one stone was missing from the completion of the building. Only then did the workers realize that the stone they had been cursing all those years was the most beautiful stone of all and the key to the completion of their building.
We do the same. Anything that does not fit our view of the world is rejected. My design document, Mahesh's code and Luke's requirements do not fit Brett's view of this project so they are rejected. Brett's personality does not fit my goals for the ecology of this work place and so I want to reject him. This is human nature.
We grow, however, when we see the bigger picture and understand how the parts we had rejected fit into a better whole. Here is a key to best practices:
--
We need to teach people to integrate the parts they want to reject.
--
Stating this in another way, we need to help people mature from being focused on themselves to the place where they integrate multiple cultures into one concept.
The way to do that is to create dissonance. Mahatma Gandhi created dissonance by refusing to behave like a colonial subject should behave. Martin Luther King Jr. created dissonance by refusing to behave like a good colored person should behave. My goal is to hold the dissonance of Brett, Mahesh and Luke in close proximity and allow each to change the other. This will be a journey. We are going to need to seek not only the solution to this technical problem but also the solution to our relationships. If I can hold this together we just might not only build the customer's application but also help each other to grow in the process.
Six Scapegoats
There are six of us now locked into delivering
Workplace Ecology: A Case Study in Project Management Page 10