EPIC reverse psychology!

Yesterday was supposed to be a major milestone for a major project in my company BUT the cutover was not as desired and the Project Manager (PM) decided that it was not up to his expectation and called off the cutover. However over the prolonged weekend due to a public holiday, the team was able to find and learn more about their system's behaviour in real life environment. Thankfully with this failure, some issues which were unknown were found and some even resolved.

Today, in the so called post mortem meeting, he sarcastically relieved everyone from any fault by declaring that any of the company's staff is now given the super power right of "It is not my fault!". If you are the company's staff, you cannot be put to blame for the system not able to perform as per expectation or any errors that reared its ugly head. Instead ... its the vendor's fault. Initially, it was supposed to be true because the part which was holding back the whole project was discovered to be a system design bug or requires a heck of a tuning.

Further into the meeting, when the staff are more relaxed thinking that they are now free from any guilt of mistakes were sarcastically critisized by pointing out to him/her of what was wrong BUT later relieved of their so called mistake/error. Im sure that the person who was in the wrong would definately be hurting because my role as an independant party also could understand his ulterior motive of using that statement.

From a PM's standpoint coupled with his flair, understanding of the system and overall knowledge of the products under his care, I think this was a great way to critisize and motivate the team to do better in the next try. Everyone still have the fire in their eyes to continue the battle after more than 1 week of very little sleep. Most of the team slept very little over the weekend trying frantically to ensure that everything was OK to proceed. Everything was quite good except for the part where the system let them down tremendously.

This kind of leadership are rare and surprisingly common for those who studied overseas. Perhaps there is really something which you gain from paying all those extra dollars. The thought process and mentality when faced wtih difficulties are very much different. This is more than "thinking outside the box" concept, I would say that its actually another level up.

This makes me even more eager to want to get out of this "well".