Taking it Personally

Recently I had an experience with a project manager that left me feeling badly and I took the exchange entirely PERSONAL. You can insert your eye roll here; typically it’s said that feelings have no place in work environments and more so the comment ‘its just business’ is said to tamp down the feelings that arise.

The project manager resigned. He sent me an email early on a Monday morning indicating his resignation with a two-week notice. When I read the email I called him immediately – we work in a virtual environment, so there is no office where we meet in person each day. During the course of our phone conversation he made several personal comments about me – I can only assume he meant to hurt me or at the very least unnerve me. To the best of my recollection the comments went something like this…”you make me uncomfortable, it is impossible to talk to you because you don’t listen, you haven’t resolved my workload issues”. Further when I inquired about the 2 week notice he provided to see if he would consider giving the client a longer notice period and hopefully that would help him as well if he didn’t have a contract or employment lined up he responded with “that is none of your business and I am not going to talk to you about that”. Finally he closed with “working with you has become untenable.”

WOW!

Many, many, many emotions rolling through my body: pissed, anger, frustration, etc… which manifested in physical responses; my hands were shaking, my heart was racing, my head was aching. And my feelings were hurt. This is not to say that reactions and feelings are the same. I am a HUGE believer in controlling your reactions to a situation. What you feel doesn’t have to be what you react with. Maintaining your composure is always advised! I maintained my composure and advised him to speak to an HR manager (which I am not) to see if there was something they could do for him to make his last two weeks more tenable <given his opinion that I am devil> – I did not vocalize that last part.

I was never going to react to his statements and create an HR nightmare for myself. I am a consultant, so there is never a direct HR reporting relationship between myself and another PM. But I also am a consultant who depends on her professional reputation to continue a long list of distinguished projects and clients. I take my reputation very seriously. And here was a co-consultant I worked with daily who believed I was Lucifer. I brewed on this for a few days and tried to determine how we went from working together reasonably well to the belief that I am the devil.

Ultimately I decided not to overanalyze this situation and more importantly I cannot control how other people feel about me. I don’t know his personal situation and what other burdens he might be carrying in life. I do know that by the end of that very week he had retracted his resignation and was going to continue his work on our projects. There is a very long boring backstory to how we had already started shifting his workload, conversations about how to get him better work/life balance, how our styles were wildly different, etc. Those conversations had been ongoing for a few weeks and we were waiting for a key day at the end of April to make some changes, however his resignation (and retraction) came before that future date we had agreed to.

After some time to allow the emotions to simmer down, I have decided I am going to take it personally. I work daily with this PM on his projects as his Program Manager, with his stakeholders, with his coworkers, etc… I spend more time with this team of PM’s that I do my family in typical week. I love the work we are doing and I did like working with the team, including this PM. But he changed that when he said things questioned my professionalism, reputation, character, etc. He did intend to attack me personally in that conversation, what his objectives were I will never know, and I don’t need to. What I will do is continue to manage him and the projects as I would any other PM without biased or prejudice because that is the professional that I am. I refuse to let this change me, but I will continue to take it personally. Oddly just a week or so later I ran into this article in HBR indicating it’s okay to take things personally if I want to. Nice to feel validated!

#projectmanagement #PM #programmanagement #hbr