Personal Responsibility

One of the elements of behavior in the workplace that I find most challenging is to deal with a person who doesn't accept personal responsibility for what they're doing. It's often the case where such a person will highlight to one and many where someone else has fallen short on the task. In one such case today, a PM turned (again) on the team for not completing work as needed. Unfortunately, this was brought to my attention at the last minute.

A PM should be tracking the work all along the way, and should never have last-minute surprises. There is always technical risk in projects, but a task not completed on time and only discovered at the last minute shows the PM wasn't paying attention.

This PM has continued to bring to me cases where work that should be tracked by the PM isn't complete as needed, and that somebody has again let him down. It's troubling because the PM needs to have people complete the work as distributed.

I now have the coaching opportunity to 1) get this person to track the work more effectively; 2) highlight earlier that the work is running late; 3) work on how to get the PM to have the work done without escalation.