The Project Book

CHAPTER 20 SAY SORRY

‘The refusal to express regret and to apologise,’ writes Marshall Goldsmith in his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, ‘is one of the top 20 transactional flaws performed by one person to another’. A preparedness to say sorry is critical to maintaining the respect of the project team and the stakeholders. It’s your way of admitting that you got something wrong, that you recognise its implications and are prepared to own it. It also demonstrates your humanity.

There is a lot of arrogance in project management today, as evidenced by the fact that most projects still fail to deliver what’s expected of them. And it’s exhibited mainly by the people who sponsor and manage projects, convinced they’re doing a good job and that others are to blame when things go wrong.

Bad projects are hotbeds of finger-pointing, and more often than not the project manager is the recipient of it. I’ve found that in some 85 per cent of cases where I’m asked to investigate why a project is off-track, the project manager hasn’t accepted responsibility for their actions. They haven’t done enough planning, haven’t built the relationships with the team. They’re slavishly following a method that no one cares about but them, and they’re not monitoring or controlling delivery. As a result, the team are working around them to get the job done.

In these cases, the project manager should of course hold up their hand and admit their mistakes in order to win the team back and set about ...