The hidden costs of favoritism in project management
Key takeaways
In every successful project, clarity and accountability are foundational. Yet, many projects suffer when project managers prioritize personal relationships or team comfort over rigorous accountability.
Playing favorites can lead to preferential treatment, which often undermines project integrity and accountability. This can manifest in numerous ways, such as when project managers overlook poor performance, fail to escalate issues or provide inaccurate status reports to make the team look good. While this behaviour may initially appear benign, it often results in budget overruns, delays and a lack of transparency.
Understanding this phenomenon and addressing it head-on are essential for program and project success.
Spotting the signs
Identifying favoritism early can save organizations both cost and stress. Use the following health check to see if your current project displays any of these common symptoms:
- Ambiguous status reports: Updates are consistently optimistic but lack clear detail or concrete milestones.
- Informal communication: Frequent "side conversations" substitute for well-documented notes and clear action items.
- Budget drift: Discrepancies and lack of detail emerge between forecasted costs and actual spending, often rationalized rather than corrected.
- Preferential treatment: Team members or internal staff are consistently shielded from scrutiny, with external teams or contractors facing disproportionate demands.
- Undocumented performance issues: Problematic behaviors or performance concerns are managed privately or glossed over entirely.
Any of these issues is cause for concern.
Understanding the causes
Favoritism emerges from misguided attempts to maintain harmony or loyalty within teams. Project managers might allow issues to fester for the following reasons, with undesirable consequences:
- Team morale: Difficult conversations and poor status reports are avoided to preserve morale, allowing underperformance to persist.
- Fear of conflict: Concerns about political or interpersonal backlash create hesitancy to escalate risks and issues promptly, leading to unresolved problems that compound over time.
- Discomfort: Protecting teams or leaders from uncomfortable truths may create scope shifts, surprise costs and unrealistic timelines.
- Lack of clarity: Ambiguity in roles or unclear escalation protocols can unintentionally encourage favoritism and discourage accountability.
The true cost of favoritism can be substantial as issues accumulate. Hidden inefficiencies, increasing costs, underperformance, poor quality and eroded trust may arise as stakeholders lose confidence in both the project management function and executive leadership.
Restoring accountability
Preventing favoritism requires proactive and strategic interventions, with strong project management protection from program executives. Steps leaders can take include the following:
- Establish clear expectations from the entire team: Communicate explicitly that transparent, factual reporting and escalation are nonnegotiable project management standards.
- Empower project managers with the right tools and data: Ensure project managers and the team have robust project management tools to accurately and objectively track work plans, milestones, budgets, risks, issues, action items, performance metrics and so on.
- Promote a culture of constructive transparency: Encourage and reward project managers and team members who highlight risks and issues openly and quickly, reframing red flags as items that require additional support rather than personal failures.
- Implement structured oversight: A regularly scheduled cadence of check-ins and structured reviews with clear accountability helps mitigate the risks of informal or biased reporting.
- Consider external project management: A project manager from a different department or external to the organization can often be more objective and factual than a project manager from within a delivery team.
The takeaway
Favoritism might feel harmless, but the long-term impact can be damaging. By recognizing its subtle signs, understanding its root causes and proactively reinforcing transparency and accountability, you can improve project outcomes, enhance organizational effectiveness and build lasting stakeholder trust.
Great project management, with the required clarity and accountability, leads to great project outcomes.
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