It wasn't me
Doug Ford is out there singing the Shaggy parts instead of Captain Picard-ing his way through things, and that doesn't bode well for pandemic recovery management
If I had one recommendation for anyone in middle management overseeing a large project, it’s that upon completion, you should send a summary email to the person to whom you report and copy everyone who worked on the project. In the review, mention all those copied in the email, one by one, and celebrate a single aspect of whatever their specific responsibilities entailed. I’ve done this throughout my career, and the results have always been excellent.
The people working for you feel appreciated and seen, and are much more likely to engage themselves in whatever project comes along next for which you’ll need their expertise. And it makes you look good, without any unseemly boasting. By recognizing the contributions and praising the success of others, you’re indirectly showing what a great job you did in managing resources.
Of course, there’s another side to this: the aspects that didn’t work out so well. Unless there’s a formal review of the project, I’ve always kept this list to myself. It’s important to remember what went wrong, and why it wasn’t successful for obvious reasons related to improvement. But what I noticed myself doing with these type of lists — again, throughout my career — is assigning blame to individuals as though it was always an outlier to the overall project management.
In other words, the good things that happened were because I was an excellent project manager who gave space for his people to succeed. The bad things that happened occurred randomly or were the result of individuals coming up short in terms of meeting expectations. In my memory of how the projects went, I was blameless.
I was also full of shit.
Most mistakes could easily come back to my own failure to better communicate something — whether it was expectations, the accepted workflow or even the amount of time and care that should be dedicated to a specific facet of an overall project. It may seem difficult or even harmful to carry all the breakdowns on your own back, but if it is improvement that you’re genuinely trying to attain, there is nothing like recognizing your own shortcomings and making a plan to do better next time.
There’s a wonderful pop-psychology book about this called Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). In it, authors (social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson) examine how and why our brains are wired for constant self-justification. The timing of my own reading of the book coincided with a revelation that there were repeated mistakes being made in the projects I was managing. I think, subconsciously, I had previously dismissed these common issues as coincidence, and I was just beginning to recognize my own culpability. And so, this book hit hard.
I was reminded of this epiphany on Monday, when Ontario Premier Doug Ford spoke with reporters about the provincial government’s obvious mistakes and topsy turvy policies for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking in third person (literally never advisable), Ford said, “It’s never the Premier or Doug Ford sitting in a corner making a decision,” there are hundreds of people who all weigh in.
What he’s failing to acknowledge — perhaps internally, but certainly externally — is that it is up to him to take what those hundreds of advisors are saying and make a decision based on it. That’s the job he campaigned for, and the duty he’s supposed to be performing.
During undergrad, I spent a couple summers handling onsite logistics for corporate retreats. It was a great student job for its pay and hours, but even more so in terms of education. I got to watch small businesses and large corporations deal with real human resource issues on a weekly basis, all while sitting in on a range of speakers that would make MBA students jealous.
One of the things that stuck with me from this time was a speaker for a group of executives. In talking about what constitutes a good management style, he drew a parallel between how Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation handled meetings in his situation room to how leaders should manage issues of a more corporate (less intergalactic space exploration) nature.
Essentially, Picard’s first step with any problem was to ask his senior staff for options. He’d hear everyone’s ideas out, and then move forward (engage, if you will) with what he considered the best one (sometimes with slight modifications). This, not only safeguarded him from not considering all potential options, it also ensured buy-in from his crew who were now carried some of the responsibility for what was about to be done.
I love this analogy for management. And in terms of Premier Ford, it reveals that on top of his sad attempt at dodging bullets, he’s creating a scarecrow excuse. No one, prior to yesterday, assumed he was making all these decisions by himself. We can literally see the effect that advisors and lobbyists are having on the lockdowns, unlockdowns and every confusing colour level in between.
What he’s ultimately admitting with his comments is that he’s not up to the challenge of Picard-ing his way through this; that he’s still back in the mistakes-were-made-but-not-by-me stage of project management. At this juncture — again, more than a year into the pandemic — that’s not just unfortunate, it’s a massive failure.
I keep coming back in my mind to a John Ibbitson column in the Globe and Mail from last week that begged us to “remember that [politicians are] human, that they and their advisers have been working around the clock for a year, and that most of them, most of the time, are using their best judgment, for better or worse.”
This really makes me mad. It’s so goddamn condescending to think that the very valid criticisms most of us have for our respective governments handling of the pandemic — which has directly contributed to the loss of lives — should be seasoned and somehow made to be more palatable by acknowledging that it’s a hard job. Of course governing is difficult. I can’t comprehend how anyone who desires the power of such a position could possibly be naive to that.
And yet, here we are, in Ontario, with a premier who openly blames others for his failure to do the primary objective of the office he holds: protect the people he serves. While people and businesses suffer, he’s singing the Shaggy parts.
If I had one recommendation for anyone in politics overseeing the management of a pandemic, it would be to show improvement. It’s much easier to move on from failure once you acknowledge responsibility for it.
Be more like Picard. And less like Shaggy.
Photograph via https://www.flickr.com/people/adamj4282/ - https://www.flickr.com/photos/adamj4282/166195826/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4730094