Dear Bob: What would you say about a consulting project manager who says to a member of his team, “stop talking because what you are saying doesn’t make any sense,” in front of the entire team and the clients on a zoom call?
That’s a remarkable display of incompetence dressed up as authority.
A project manager’s entire job — the whole point of the role — is to manage communication. Shutting someone down in front of clients isn’t decisive leadership, it’s panic wearing a tie. If what the team member was saying genuinely didn’t make sense, the PM had about fifteen options available: redirect the conversation, table the point for later, ask a clarifying question, or simply intervene gracefully. Instead he chose the one option that accomplished nothing useful and several things harmful simultaneously.
What it reveals is insecurity, not competence. Confident managers don’t silence people in public because they aren’t threatened by confusion — they’re paid to resolve it. The public humiliation was the tell. He needed the room to know he was in charge more than he needed the project to go well.
The client dimension makes it worse. Now the clients have seen internal dysfunction up close. They didn’t need to know there was a communication problem on the team. They do now. Whatever credibility the team member lost in that moment, the PM lost more, because the clients just watched him handle pressure by throwing a colleague under the bus.
And the team will remember it. Everyone on that call just learned the same lesson: don’t speak up, because if you say something imperfect you’ll be publicly gutted for it. That’s a chilling effect that will quietly damage every meeting going forward.
Brutal, unnecessary, and — this is the part that should sting — entirely unprofessional by the most basic standards of the job.
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