Many, many times in my career I have come across the rotting carcasses of managers who had stood on a high horse and won the battle only to loose the war in ragged retreat.
One of my mantras about entering a fight was: Can we win?, and if we win will it benefit us. Some might feel that was mealy mouthed, soft manager speak, but I disagree.s. I heard many times from employees that leaders should always fight for what was right!, but more often than not the team could never agree to what was righteous. My attitude was, if the team couldn’t define what was right, I sure wasn’t going to lead them into hell for it. I also felt strongly that it was actually a show of strength to not go down a path where teammates and employees wanted you to go, just to show who was the toughest SOB in the place.
Thisissue came up today, in a discussion with a senior construction manager who is leading a project that is going to hell in a hand-basket. The root cause of the projects failure was that the contractor had left $250,000 out of his bid and was low, (every one involved knew he had a bad bid) and the owner thought that they could take advantage of this error in this economy.
Wrong headed thinking. This project will end up in litigation. The bonding company will not make the owner whole (as they believe) financially.
And the proximate reason for guaranteed failure is not the low bid (that's a given restraint). The current reason for guaranteed project failure is that the owner has taken the first error (the low bid) personally and is editorializing project problem rather than stating the facts and working to fix the problem.
The senior manager has tried to caution the owner about making this a “personal” fight rather than a business difficulty. In the owner’s view, the contractor is an agent of the devil who must be overcome. In the real world of bonding companies, courts and juries, personal anger and personality conflicts are disallowed as irrelevant.
Five years from now, this matter will still be in litigation and all the lawyers costs, lost opportunities and anxiety will have been for nothing.
The take away:
Stay off your high horse, and be a business person. Project problems are not personal. When you write letters and record facts, lay off the editorializing about motives. Keep anger and idle threats out of the record and out of your mind. Anger only clouds your reasoning to the best possible solution for the project business problem.
I am pretty sure my health is still good, because I learned early not to assign motivations to people or companies that I had disputes with, but to deal with each problem as an optimization solution basis for everyone involved not just for me. I tried to avoid mutually assured destruction.
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