All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

“He stabbed me in the back and then threw me under the bus,” a colleague complained, once upon a time.

“Well, at least he got the sequence right,” I managed to keep myself from saying, recognizing that discretion is sometimes the right solution for even the best of straight lines. I was also was just smart enough to avoid offering just-too-late advice.

There will come a time, in your career as in mine, when you find yourself on the wrong side of backstabbing, under-the-bus throwing, or scapegoating, either separately or in some combination.

In case you are or might be vulnerable, here are some pointers.

The first: As is almost always the case, an ounce of prevention yields the usual utility, so be on the alert for warning signs. Some I’ve seen:

Your manager isolates you from key relationships. Backstabbers and scapegoaters rely on their ability to control what others hear about you. If you have positive working relationships with some people who matter and your manager lets you know he’ll be their liaison from here on in, to ensure everyone hears a consistent message or some such pretext … watch out. There’s a good chance the consistent message will be that you’re the source of whatever problems might be cropping up.

Your manager informs you that it’s important to control what his manager hears. There are a couple of variants of this:

Variant #1: “She won’t have the patience for the complexities of the situation.” She might not, unless it’s something that’s about to blow up. And as your manager probably doesn’t understand the problem to the level of depth you do either, and as it is about to blow up, guess who’s being set up to take the blame.

Variant #2: “Alarming her about the risks and issues we’re facing would be counterproductive. We need to handle this under the radar.” Same situation, different phony rationale. Especially in project situations, risk and issue management call for transparency, so everyone buys into the remediation plan.

If you’re told to conceal the facts, make sure you receive this work direction in writing, and make sure both your manager’s name and his manager’s name are on the documentation.

And if your manager accuses you of just trying to cover your posterior, your answer is, “You bet I am. If this blows up in all of our faces, I’m the one who will need the cover.”

Closely related: You decide to discuss a situation directly with your manager’s manager and she gives you air time but expresses no real interest in the situation or your recommendations.

It might be that you cry wolf a lot. If you do, stop. If you don’t, your manager might be setting you up to be a scapegoat later on when things do blow up.

You stop hearing from people you used to interact with frequently and casually. If this happens to you, it might be you’ve done something to cause it. Assume that is the case and take steps to fix whatever you broke.

Even if you didn’t break anything, use your concern as the entirely legitimate pretext for circumventing a backstabber’s attempts to warn people off when it comes to being your friend and ally.

And, it all blows up anyway. The fact of the matter is, it’s much easier to be on the wrong side of backstabbing, bus-throwing, and scapegoating than preventing them from happening. No matter how much you work to preserve and fortify your working relationships with the people who matter, backstabbers are what they are because they’ve learned how to succeed through these tactics.

They’re better at this game than you are.

If it happens to you, your manager will likely recommend that you not try to fight the outcome or dispute it.

Sometimes, that’s good advice: Fighting it keeps the subject alive, where moving on to something else can give you a clean start … so long as those whose image of you has been tarnished aren’t an important part of your future.

But don’t take your manager’s word for it. After all, his name is on your performance so he isn’t a disinterested advisor. More, if you decide to fight back your manager is left with two bad choices: (1) Back you, which means he expends political capital on your behalf, or, (2) participate in burning you instead.

For your manager it’s a no-win situation. For you it’s a tough, tough choice.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

We need some help.

“We” is Dave Kaiser, my co-author, and myself. The help we need: Figuring out the best title for our upcoming book.

The book starts with a premise more familiar to members of the KJR community than to the management world at large. The premise: There’s no such thing as an IT project — it’s always about business change or what’s the point?

We use this premise to launch what we think covers the ground of what it takes to achieve intentional business change. We don’t dive to great depths. We’ve tried to write a handbook, not a tome, for three reasons: (1) a tome would be inestimably dreary to read; (2) a tome would be even more inestimably dreary to write; (3) in any event, neither of us, separately or in combination, is remotely qualified to write about this at the tome level.

Nor, we suspect, is anyone else.

Until now, when titling a book, the challenges haven’t been conceptual. My book about IT leadership is Leading IT. When I wrote about the principles to follow in order to run a modern IT organization, Keep the Joint Running — a tie-back to this, my weekly column, seemed reasonable, as it was where I introduced most of the ideas incorporated into the book.

Naming my 54-page project management book was even easier. It presents the bare bones and only the bare bones of the discipline, so Bare Bones Project Management jumped directly from the Introduction to the folder name without any conscious effort at all.

Even The Moral Hazard of Lime Daiquiris, the worst-selling novel Dave and I co-authored (it is, by the way, an outstanding Chanukwansamas gift for everyone on your list who’s (1) a reader; (2) has questionable taste; and (3) wants to read something nobody else they know has read) made some sort of sense, as the trouble all started with two guys ordering lime daiquiris with the hope of achieving a morally questionable outcome, although not as morally grave as it turned out to be.

But now we find ourselves in a quandary. We like There’s no such thing as an IT project: Achieving intentional business change, but especially when separated from its subtitle, the main message is negative.

On the other hand, we find Achieving intentional business change to be, while accurate, a phrase that promises dullness.

It also leaves out the handbook part, which we think is important — we’re trying to identify what matters, all with enough substance to point readers in the right direction but not so much substance that they get stuck in one section for so long they forget what they read in the three preceding sections.

So, we thought, maybe it should be There’s no such thing as an IT project: A business change handbook. Or, if we do lead on a positive note, A business change handbook: Why there’s no such thing as an IT project.

Don’t really like that one? Neither do we.

And so, as we’ve read that crowdsourcing is supposed to achieve brilliant results without our having to work all that hard … how about it?

What’s that you say? You need to know what the book actually covers? Alright — it covers the management culture change needed for intentional business change to happen; redefining the business/IT relationship so everyone focuses on the change instead of who’s to blame for nothing important happening; how to fix Agile so it delivers business change instead of software; how IT and business operations fits into the whole picture; replacing IT governance with business change governance; IT regaining its place of leadership in defining business strategy; and a very brief look at the seven disciplines organizations must master in making intentional change happen.

Please leave your suggestions as Comments, to facilitate the whole crowdsourcing thing — presumably it’s only crowdsourcing if everyone who looks sees all the other ideas already posted.

We do reserve the right to ignore all of you, especially if our publisher disagrees — we do need to acknowledge their expertise in such matters, not to mention recognizing the critical role the fine art of sucking-up plays in our working relationship with our editor.

But if you do submit the winning entry, what you’ll get in return is us telling everyone we know what a wonderful and creative person you are.

Who else would make you a promise like that?

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