Project Managers: Can they live up to the expectation?

With so many young people working in Indian IT industry, there is huge challenge to manage the staff in unique ways so as to keep them motivated and guide them. I have been huge fan of Mr. NRN Murthy, Chief Mentor, Infosys and Mr. Subroto Bagchi, Chief Gardner, Mindtree. These great men spend considerable in mentoring, helping employees become true professionals. Mr. Bagchi mentions need for mentorship in his fabulous book, Go kiss the world. It is a must read for all young professionals.

Sadly, employees don’t realize the value of a guide or a mentor, and even if they do, they don’t find mentors because of their acute shortage. A mentor is one who can bring you out of all disillusions and confusions; He is the one who shapes the young mind to do the best. He understands and helps you with lessons on career and industry; He nurtures your ambitions, aspirations and goals. Most importantly, he is the one whom you look up to and get inspired.
In IT industry, this mentor role can be beautifully played by Project Managers who closely work with team members, especially with those who are new in their careers and can play a vital role in mentoring them. Unfortunately, neither Project managers nor employees seek such a kind of role modeling.

In one his articles in The Economic Times dated 5th July 2010, Mr. R Gopalakrishnan, ED Tata Sons suggests “To be successful it is important that a manager is perceived as authentic and genuine.” It is in this context, I have seen that expectation of mentorship is a far cry if managers don’t even match up to such basic qualities.

But why does it happen?
In IT Industry, Project managers manage projects of team size ranging from 5 to 100. Their primary job is to successfully deliver projects within boundaries of scope, cost and time. Fortunately, projects get delivered without much value-add from Project managers. These managers don’t even focus on upgrading their skills, finding scope of doing things better and most importantly setting the benchmarks for other team members to follow. Many of them can’t imagine the scope and challenges of project management involved in building dams, highways, refineries etc. wherein millions of dollars is at stake, work environment is harsh, where project managers need to deal with an unskilled laborer to a highly skilled engineering staff.
How do they survive then?
Without value addition, they are able to survive because of their low cost in dollar terms. A number of clients don’t bother not to pay for a project manager for even small team sizes because in dollar terms, perhaps they get a project manager for the cost of a software engineer.

But how long these so called not performing project mangers survive? Until the cost arbitrage is reduced or IT budgets are severely cut, the breed of underperforming managers will continue to be on board.

It is not that managers are not capable. Many have illustrious pedigree. Just that over the years, the fire in their belly is doused. They have become complacent and habituated of easy money.
In such a scenario, how will they add value to customers and focus on employees’ careers?
If go you around the campuses of IT companies and interview employees, they would grossly crib about their managers. They perceive them as overhead to a project, who does some talking, prepares some reports in excel or doc. Some won’t even have soft skills to deal with human resources because of their rise from technical roles and lack of exposure to human resource perspectives.

It is not that I have come across only such project managers. I have been fortunate to work with one of the best project managers in the industry and have got mentored by them but this post just happens to be an output of series of observations that had been troubling me for a long time.

Image source http://mohannadtayeb.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/proj_mng.jpg