Sponsors, customers, and management all expect projects to deliver what they promised, for the price promised, by the date promised. When they perceive that progress isn't in line with expectations, they can apply pressure to the project team, and that pressure can itself become a hindrance.

Freeway damage in the 1989 Loma Prieta, California, earthquake. Unexpected events often have unexpected consequences.
Photo by U.S. Geological Survey courtesy Wikipedia.
Here are some insights about the unexpected that can help with managing and preventing pressure. See "Managing Pressure: Communications and Expectations," Point Lookout for December 13, 2006, and "Managing Pressure: Milestones and Deliveries," Point Lookout for December 27, 2006, for more.
- Educate everyone about the inevitability of setbacks
- When a setback happens, perceptions of progress can change permanently, even if the setback is eventually overcome, and even if time lost is recovered. If customers or sponsors have to report the setback to people who have great organizational power, they are sometimes subject to personal consequences.
- Outside the context of any specific project, educate sponsors and managers about setbacks. Explain that because project work has either never been done before, or has never been done by this organization, setbacks are inevitable. When setbacks happen, be open about them. Hiding them or spinning them puts your own credibility at risk.
- Be wary of near-delivery setbacks
- Setbacks just prior to delivery are especially problematic. Customers might have made preparations for the delivery and those arrangements constitute both financial and psychological commitment. A setback just prior to delivery creates embarrassment, frustration, and irritation, which can lead to distrust and perceived lack of progress that are otherwise unwarranted.
- Monitor internal status carefully just prior to any delivery. As soon as you know of problems that put delivery at risk, pass the information along. Help people mitigate the consequences of slips, and commit to all this in the project plan.
- Keep loads uniform
- Setbacks just
prior to delivery
are especially
problematic - Uniform loads create a sense of steady progress. Load variations, especially spikes, degrade assessments of progress. For instance, if a project undergoes a crisis requiring an out-of-plan management decision, management endures a load spike. Afterwards, the incident isn't forgotten - it usually lingers in the form of degraded perceptions of progress. Similar effects occur within the project team.
- When trouble looms, inform management early, to give them time to prepare for decision-making. Balance the loads on project team members carefully, making schedule changes as necessary — if you can — to keep loads uniform.
- Don't expect breakthroughs to erase anxiety
- Breakthroughs usually seem less significant than setbacks of similar magnitude. Hyping breakthroughs to enhance morale, or to correct perceptions about progress, probably won't work — people tend to discount such announcements because they tend to serve the project's leaders' interests.
- Use breakthroughs instead to enhance the status of the people who achieve them. Honor them and recognize them. You'll do more for morale that way than you can accomplish by trying to send the all-is-now-well message to skeptical audiences.
Next time we'll look at managing pressure by means of defining milestones, deliveries, and their spacing. Top
Next Issue
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Micromanagement is a common source of pressure. For insights on micromanagers and micromanaging, see "When Your Boss Is a Micromanager," Point Lookout for December 5, 2001; "There Are No Micromanagers," Point Lookout for January 7, 2004; "Are You Micromanaging Yourself?," Point Lookout for November 24, 2004; and "How to Tell If You Work for a Nanomanager," Point Lookout for March 7, 2007.
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Related articles
More articles on Workplace Politics:
Devious Political Tactics: A Field Manual
- Some practitioners of workplace politics use an assortment of devious tactics to accomplish their ends.
Since most of us operate in a fairly straightforward manner, the devious among us gain unfair advantage.
Here are some of their techniques, and some suggestions for effective responses.
How to Avoid Responsibility
- Taking responsibility and a willingness to be held accountable are the hallmarks of either a rising
star in a high-performance organization, or a naïve fool in a low-performance organization. Either
way, you must know the more popular techniques for avoiding responsibility.
Before You Blow the Whistle: II
- When organizations become aware of negligence, miscalculations, failures, wrongdoing, or legal infractions,
they often try to conceal the bad news. People who disagree with the concealment activity sometimes
decide to reveal what the organization is trying to hide. Here's Part II of our catalog of methods used
to suppress the truth.
Some Hazards of Skip-Level Interviews: III
- Skip-level interviews — dialogs between a subordinate and the subordinate's supervisor's supervisor
— can be hazardous. Here's Part III of a little catalog of the hazards, emphasizing subordinate-initiated
skip-level interviews.
On Reporting Workplace Malpractice
- Reporting workplace malpractice can be the right thing to do. And it's often career-dangerous. Here
are some risks to ponder before reporting what you know.
See also Workplace Politics, Conflict Management and Managing Your Boss for more related articles.
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Coming April 25: Narcissistic Behavior at Work: VI
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And on May 2: Narcissistic Behavior at Work: VII
- Narcissistic behavior at work prevents trusting relationships from developing. It also disrupts existing relationships, and generates toxic conflict. One class of behaviors that's especially threatening to relationships is disregard for the feelings of others. In this part of our series we examine the effects of that disregard. Available here and by RSS on May 2.
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Beware any resource that speaks of "winning" at workplace politics or "defeating" it. You can benefit or not, but there is no score-keeping, and it isn't a game.
- Wikipedia has a nice article with a list of additional resources
- Some public libraries offer collections. Here's an example from Saskatoon.
- Check my own links collection
- LinkedIn's Office Politics discussion group

