Project Boardroom Whispers: The Truth about Project Teams

As a project manager, you lead people, which can be challenging for both new and experienced managers. Often, your project team has more senior members than you in terms of job titles, which can be intimidating.  

How do you make project decisions when, in reality, you’re the most junior team member? Tight, right? Welcome to the world of project managers, where navigating complex team dynamics is everyday life.  

It’s well known that your team influences your project’s success or failure. It’s also clear that when a project doesn’t succeed, the project manager is blamed, but when it does, it’s called a team success.  

When onboarding a team, you should base it on each member’s expertise. Then, assign project roles and communicate with each person. Initially, everything is aligned. So, what exactly causes team dysfunctions?  

In this article, we will explore the hidden truths about project teams. Here’s the reality of the type of team you’ll eventually have on board, different from the one you onboarded. 

The Self-Appointed Executor

• This person will not fulfil their project role but will assign themselves to other work outside the project scope without consulting you, yet they expect you to align with it immediately. They are too senior for the role they were given. 

The Role Holder 

• This person does nothing in their assigned role, yet attends all meetings and contributes nothing, and still refuses to step down from the team. They will forever cheer everyone else’s hard work, but they have no idea what is happening in their own area. 

The Non-Compliant Senior 

• This person sees you as too inexperienced to lead the project. They will oppose your updates, criticise your decisions in every meeting, and never willingly share updates with you. They won’t even copy you on project emails. Who are you to be a project manager? 

The Command-and-Demand Actor

• This person will give you verbal orders at the last minute and expect you to carry them out without adhering to the project process. They will even scold you for not following their out-of-scope instructions. They cannot be challenged; their input is final.  

The Time-Pressure Protester 

• This team member will shout at you for setting the project schedule, claiming that the timeline for their area isn’t practical because they are busy with other non-project-related tasks. Mark, you know the entire project depends on them completing that one task. They will remind you that you have no right to set deadlines.  

The Credit Hijacker 

• This team member has no shame in stealing all your credit. They wait for you to work on something, then plagiarise it and claim it as their own. They monitor every edit and report you make, and without your knowledge, they submit reports before your official update. By the time you provide your update, you look like the one who hijacked the work. 

The Project Bully 

• This person will bully you nonstop and try to gather others to oppose you as the project manager. They will dismiss your role, delegate your tasks to someone else, block access to information, humiliate you publicly, and when you confront them, they play the victim. After all, they are older than you. 

The Authority Flip-Flopper 

• They will grant you the authority to lead and make decisions, but will still ask you who granted you that authority. They won’t protect you from project bullies. They will let you get roasted and expect you to defend yourself. They don’t solve conflicts. 

The Meeting Ghost 

• Those who always attend meetings but are out of touch with all project updates. They challenge decisions made months ago in meetings they attended. They ask questions about agenda items discussed in previous sessions. They don’t know anything about the project, and they expect you to repeat all the information to them. 

The Blame Shifter 

• Those who make public project errors and ignore that they did it. They will then unapologetically pass the blame for the failure to you and walk free. They are not responsible. They will not apologise for the errors because they are not the project manager. And yes, they will scream at you for an oversight that is still under their watch. 

The VIP-Only Crew 

• Many of these team members prefer working only with high-level or high-profile stakeholders and avoid junior ones. If you’re not a C-suite executive, they won’t engage with you. A lack of engagement also applies to you as the project manager; you’re considered too junior for them. You are not allowed to contact “their” contacts; only they can do that.  

The I-Told-You Club 

• You will have more talkers than doers. Many will have points to make. They will present proposals for you to implement. However, they won’t be involved. They don’t get their hands dirty. Oh yes, if things don’t go well, they will come back and say, “I told you!” 

The Publicity Chaser 

• Those team members who are so thirsty for publicity that they will ignore pressing the wrong button as long as they are the face of the project. They will want their names included in external communication. They want you to allocate roles that handle only their external profiling. Your point of view does not matter. They will have contributed only 5% of the project deliverables, but want 95% of the publicity. 

Do you relate to the members mentioned in this article? What do you do as a project manager? Different strategies apply. The first is to document lessons learned and review your team members before onboarding them to the next project. We must learn from our experiences, but do not lose focus.  

Happy Project Management!