Honesty is the best policy

The blame game poisons projects. To build a learning culture, we need more open and trusting projects where people can be honest without worrying about blowback. Richard Young has been seeking psychological safety

Whether you take a carrot or stick approach, convincing your project team that they won’t be penalised for speaking honestly about things that haven’t gone to plan can be hard work. It might be their previous experience of working in a toxic project environment that was imbued with fear or ambivalence. Maybe they don’t believe that they won’t be penalised for openly talking about failings and that these failings will instead be viewed as valuable opportunities from which to learn.

While good project discipline includes lessons learned to help the organisation and its project managers improve, people rarely feel comfortable with total honesty, especially when an in-progress project demands positivity. And when issues do crystallise, plenty of people play the blame game rather than addressing problems constructively, further eroding willingness to speak up. No one wants to be the messenger who gets shot.

“We see this a lot,” says Neil Turner, reader in project learning at Cranfield School of Management. “Projects that are green lights all the way can suddenly go red after a year because no one wanted to be the bad-news person three months in. The whole thing goes off the rails without warning.

“We need psychological safety – a state where people feel they can raise issues without recrimination. That state can be seen in high-performing teams, and most people understand why it’s desirable. But it’s hard to build psychological safety – and it’s frighteningly easy to break it.”

Open communication is key. “People instinctively understand how important honesty is – especially with clients,” says Ellie Carswell, graduate project manager at programme management consultancy Faithful+Gould. “When things aren’t going to plan, you need to trust each other. But how often are we open to talking about problems?”

Too scared to speak up

Culture of any kind is usually defined from the top, and the behaviour of sponsors and other senior stakeholders can torpedo a culture of open communication. Andrew Wright is director of Dynamic Technologies, a project management consultancy. “I worked for the UK arm of a US multinational, and we found it impossible to have sensible discussions about risk management,” he says. “The US sponsors saw ‘risk’ and ‘issues’ as synonymous. If you raised a risk factor, they thought you must have done something wrong. I saw two project managers and a supplier fired for ‘allowing problems’ in their area. The result was that no project manager would flag risks for fear of being branded a failure.”

Even when the sanctions for being honest about problems are less brutal, there are plenty of reasons people fail to share them. “We’re into the field of ‘impression management’, a concept that dates back to at least the 1950s,” says Martin Whitehead, a project management veteran now at the London School of Economics working on a PhD in ethical behaviours.

“In many organisations, there’s a fear of being seen to be weak or lacking competence – so people can’t admit what they don’t know. Part of the problem is lack of trust in evaluation systems – people assume issues will stick to them regardless of their personal culpability – and it’s partly seeing that ‘political’ players do well in the organisation.”

How to stop the blame game

So how can good project leaders help people overcome those instincts and open up? “We know from research how important personal relationships are to organisations that function well and manage project complexity better,” says Turner. “Information is shared more openly within teams, with stakeholders and up to sponsors.”

When team members feel a project manager sees them in the round – in a way that a formal HR evaluation process might not – they’re more likely to open up. Equally, project managers might need support in softening and tailoring their approach. Tough questions where the blame game is the norm will make people defensive. Being direct when people know they’ll be supported if they’re honest and dispassionate should yield results.

Kelvin Downer, founder of Pursuit Communications, is a coach who reckons team solidarity in the face of problems can be fostered with some introspection on all sides. “I worked with a large client where the culture was obsession with daily key performance indicators,” he explains. “Anything that derailed the daily push got squashed, making it hard to be honest about problems. Team coaching can hold up a mirror to poor team behaviours that can develop in that kind of culture.”

Some projects have a need to self-criticise built into them. “In ‘high reliability organisations’, where failure is unacceptable – such as oil rigs, nuclear power stations or aircraft – you typically find a culture of sharing problems because lives are on the line,” says Turner.

That’s not to say that you never apportion blame. “Sometimes you need to call out the idiotic or unprofessional,” he adds. “But if your project contains risks or uncertainties, you need to be able to communicate very clearly that trying new things and making mistakes isn’t a bad thing.” If the team appreciate that some steps on the project are experimental, they’ll be more open to sharing both successes and failures.

Carswell reckons the changing nature of the profession is helping on that score. “There’s a more diverse workforce than in the past,” she says. “And more people have project management as a first job. They bring less baggage from past experience of their sector and that results in less posturing and more open-mindedness.” Or, as Wright puts it, “Fresher faces tend to be more open than veteran contractors who might be more hard-bitten and likely to keep their heads down.”

One technique Downer uses to accelerate this cultural shift is ‘Design Team Alliance’. “It’s just three questions,” he explains. “What will help the team thrive? What can the team agree to do when things get sticky? And what atmosphere do we want to create together? The answers are a living agreement on what’s acceptable and desirable, especially when things go wrong – and that serves as a guide when new people join the team, too.”

Don’t shoot the messenger

Everyone we spoke to stressed that project honesty comes back to leadership. “As soon as it’s clear a leader is in the habit of shooting the messenger, they kill the culture on the team,” says Turner. “You’re more open when you know a manager’s or sponsor’s first instinct is to be supportive and offer solutions when something has gone wrong.

“So, walking and talking with team members is crucial. If you’re hostile when faced with bad news or you’re too remote, you’re not going to hear about problems until it’s too late.” Downer sees this all the time in team coaching sessions. “When you’re trying to build a safer environment, it’s important the leaders go first,” he says. “If they open up, it creates permission for others to follow. Then you can build on the team’s cognitive diversity to open up new ideas for addressing problems.”

That can be as simple as leaders openly apologising when they’ve done something wrong. It’s no good telling employees that it’s good to fail and learn from mistakes if you never confess to errors of your own. “People are generally pretty cute about what’s happening in organisations; they can see how people get ahead,” says Whitehead. “So, if you want people to be open and learn from mistakes, you have to show you can, too.”

Revamping lessons learned

“A lot of people are too busy with the next project to update standards, much less reshape the culture of the organisation,” says Andrew Wright, director at Dynamic Technologies. “If individuals forget the key lessons from project failures, informing the corporate memory is a hopeless mission. And even when people realise what they should be doing differently, they often can’t recall why that is.”

At programme management consultancy Faithful+Gould, top-level buy-in was critical to making lessons learned more effective. Graduate project manager Ellie Carswell argues it’s all about taking a holistic view of the value from projects. “The CEO supports the idea of continuous improvement,” she says. “He’s behind concepts such as ‘five whys’ analysis, six sigma and lean methodology – which all help solve problems. That shifts the culture beyond technical proficiency and into better collaboration, which drives client retention and talent engagement, not just short-term performance.”

This shifts lessons learned from a list of good and bad ones (“an archive document,” as Carswell puts it) to a more thematic discussion. “You don’t just fill out a form when something’s gone wrong – you can have more open conversations,” she explains.

Volunteers from around the business were recruited to be champions for this new approach, Carswell says: “Wherever project teams are working, there’s someone accessible for a chat.”

Lessons are captured not by project, but by theme.

“But we don’t want it to become too routine or passive,” Carswell continues. “So we’ve created a series of ‘spotlight’ events for colleagues when they’re about to embark on a particular task or phase. We’ve done them on roofing, for example, or tendering. We also have biannual workshops where champions can share lessons from these spotlight sessions.”

Neil Turner of Cranfield has been working on an approach to project complexity. “The best way to share experiences and resolve problems is to do it more socially – through a Friday stand-up seminar, for example, where teams discuss their projects. How you talk is important, too. Many project managers tell us that project meetings can be dull and backward-looking. Reframe them as forward-facing discussions to address problems.”

How to avoid the blame game

Project quizzed project managers (anonymously) for their first-hand advice:

“Root cause analysis can help. Not just ‘x didn’t do their job on time’, but understanding why they didn’t. Occasionally it’s personal performance, but usually it’s more organisational – competing priorities or unrealistic expectations in the first place.”

“Lead by example and find reasons to question what you could have done differently in any situation that looks like a failure. Good leaders relay that to their team, take ownership then move forward constructively.”

“Failure has to be seen to be okay when dealing with lots of unknowns, imperfect processes and people trying their best. And that can’t be assumed until leadership shows that kind of honesty to the team first.”

“Frame it as: ‘What could we have done 10 per cent better?’ This way, there’s no weight of blame, and it’s safer to acknowledge what didn’t work. Discuss team rather than individual factors: at what points did the team seem challenged, why and what should we do next time?”

“Pronouns matter for leaders. ‘I’ for mess-ups. Taking responsibility sends a signal that messing up happens. ‘It’ for root cause analysis. ‘Why was the customer told that?’, instead of ‘who told them?’ It’s about a process failure, not about personal weakness. And ‘we’ for accomplishments.”