Question

How does a Project Manager, in some cases, work like a politician?

▪Please explain this by applying it in a project that you have previously been (or currently) involved with, within your organization

Answer 1

Politics is something which is present everywhere. It is most seen at the workplace apart form the professional politicians who do it for money and recognition. As I mentioned, in a corporate world, apart from hardwork, talent and discipline , the art of being politically correct and having political intelligence is extremely important if he or she needs to grow. Therefore, it os often seen that people who work hard often struggle to grow in their careers as they are only inclines towards minding their own business and excel in what they do. This gets them away from a lot of people within the organisation, some of them are jealous, some of them back bite and so on. At a point, where the individual who does not have a good connect within the organisation is targeted and ousted out of the organisation. These are all political games that are played within an organisation.

Similarly, a project manager faces the same kind of heat if he or she is not inclines with the most influential members in an organisation. Thus, a project manager in some cases acts like a politician to ensure that he or she and his team do not face any difficulty during the tenure of their project. If the project manager is selfish and obsessed with their own success, there is every chance that they take the limelight of the success of the project thereby paving a path for his or her own growth within the organisation.

I can very well connect with a similar kind of experience where my project manager was self obsessed with his own success and never gave us an opportunity to showcase ourselves neither did he highlight us on any of the successful completions. We were not very happy to be working under him but the circumstances prompted us to stick to the same as it was the most happening project within the organisation and we had a hope that our project manager would highlight us this time atleast.

As usual, he put a lot of pressure on us to reach the committed deadline. The one good thing with him was that he used to maintain very good rapport with several influential people which helped him get away from tough challenges with ease and we were quiet comfortable with that. He used to behave like a professional politician where he used to highlight issues only when needed and would highlight the successes that we used to get phase by phase. He never let his mistakes come out in the open and acted very politically correct if he thought that he might get penalised for the mistake. Instead, he used to push it to other cross-functional teams.