Project accountability is for leaders too

An organizational culture that excludes leader accountability will undoubtedly cause your projects to fail. If you, as a project manager or PMO leader, find yourself coming up short despite your continued efforts to implement a PMI strategy to improve project performance, be easy on yourself. The root cause of your challenge may be a need for more leadership accountability at the organizational level. This article is here to empower you and help you recognize the warning signs of an organizational culture that can sink any project or PMO's success if not recognized and addressed by both project and organizational leaders.
 
Proceed with caution if you manage projects for an organization with these five red flags.
 

1. Unwillingness to Document Process and Workflows: Some things don't need to be explained. Process documentation for long-standing workflows is one of those things. I once worked for an organization that refused to create process documentation for project managers and stood sternly against my efforts to develop it for my team. The lack of documentation left many team members needing more clarity of expectations. Management's rationale for forbidding the entire exercise was that it took too long, and every step in the workflow did not need to be documented. I was puzzled and tried to counter that objection with common sense. Documented workflows and process steps are vital artifacts that help project managers succeed. Task lists, schedules, communications, quality standards, task durations, and other key essentials can all be derived by referencing process documentation. Documentation can also be used as a training tool to help new project managers when they join the team. Beyond that, it is a reference guide for complicated processes. Lastly, and most importantly, understanding workflows and documentation helps project managers determine where improvements and changes can be made to bring about improvements. 
2. Useless and Critically Flawed Technology: At a minimum, your organizational leaders should be willing to provide project teams with viable tools and technology that provide accurate reporting. After all, a project manager's role is to help the organization reach its goals by effectively applying project management principles and using operative tools. There is never a legitimate reason for leadership to push a nonviable project management tool to teams and demand performance excellence, especially when dealing with compliance matters. If your leadership team is unwilling to acknowledge and address technology issues, consider the red flag raised. Moreover, if there is a refusal to improve or make better use of an existing tool at a minimum cost, run for the hills because it is clear they are uninterested in helping your PMO succeed.
3. Blaming and Retaliation: Toxic work cultures don't always cause projects to fail but strain long-term working relationships. This is particularly true when the project management team is forced to work in an environment that refuses to hold leaders accountable for their own deadlines. There was a time when I worked for a firm where it was widely known that partner-level leaders continuously missed their deadlines by weeks. When project managers and PMO leaders reached out to remind them of their due dates and the impacts on the timeline, they were reprimanded and retaliated against. More infuriating was the hypocritical expectation that downstream teams should stay up all night, work extra hard, crash schedules, and miss family vacations to ensure down stream teams completed the project on time. If not, they could look forward to escalations and childlike reprimands from the same leaders who unapologetically wrecked the schedule in the first place.
4. Report Rigging: Consider this a red flag with fireworks. A work environment that will not allow the PMO to report the delays and shortcomings of the upstream team simply because they are organizational leaders is a troubling practice that creates a very unpleasant double standard within an organization's environment. This behavior strips operations teams and project managers of the ability to plan, reconfigure schedules, and negotiate resources for the remainder of the project. This practice creates unnecessary ambiguity and comes across as selfish and uncaring to downstream team members who are always crunched for time despite their efforts to plan to meet workload demands adequately.
5. The Role is Devalued: It is miserable when leaders within the organization underestimate and undervalue the importance of the project manager's role. A few ways to know you and your role are devalued include not being invited to key meetings that impact your project and team. Hearing statements like, "Project managers don't really do anything," you are asked to perform lower-level administrative tasks like scheduling non-project-related meetings and booking travel instead of leading calls.  

Effective project management is a science. Our education, access to resources, and ability to implement PMI standards are valuable and should be leveraged to ensure any organization's success. As a project manager, we must balance scope, time, and budget. We are skilled at managing and mitigating risks. We are 'full picture' people. We are valuable beyond measure, and it is our job to hold our project teams accountable for the sake of the organizations we serve. When organizational leaders refuse accountability, it jeopardizes your ability to be successful. If you ever experience these persistent red flags, recognize that the issues may stem from powers more significant than you and your project management skillset. The actual root cause may be a need for more leadership accountability.