October 1, 2026
This article was first published on Woven Leadership on Substack.
A conversation with Hadon McKinley on reviewing project manager performance led by Megan Lynch, Strategic Advisor, Independent Consultant, and Founding Editor of Woven Leadership on Substack.
A project manager can hit every milestone, stay under budget, and still be quietly failing the program. PMI’s Standard for Program Management asks leaders to judge whether project managers advance program goals, not just project goals, yet most reviews stop at schedule and cost. I spoke with Hadon McKinley, an executive coach and former Air Force navigator, about what standard reviews miss, and why this gap costs more than most organizations realize.
When Every KPI Is Green and Something Is Still Wrong
McKinley’s central claim is uncomfortable. Many high performers are not thriving. They are burning out in ways that look identical to excellence. “You get this burnout disguised as high performance,” she said. Stress hormones build, judgment narrows, and project managers convince themselves that working every weekend is the only path to hitting their numbers. The work still gets done. “They’re going to meet their KPIs,” McKinley explained, “but they’re also going to run the risk of being so deep in the project that they’re not managing the project.” Tunnel vision sets in, and a missed critical path becomes invisible to the person closest to it.
Traditional metrics often fail to catch this. Programs skip a deeper review because the numbers look fine and because the conversation is politically uncomfortable. Even worse, rewarding the person who works every Saturday quietly trains everyone else to do the same. McKinley described building that exact expectation for herself earlier in her career. “If you tell people that the expectation is that you will take it on, that is now the expectation,” she said. When she later asked for help, her team was baffled. She had unintentionally trained them not to even offer it.
Stakeholders resist this work for a related reason. Naming hidden assumptions exposes decisions leadership made and never explained. McKinley recalled discovering, mid-project, that leadership had accepted a break-even bid and never told the delivery team and then held that team to a standard that assumed profit. “Leadership is limiting the abilities of its team,” she said, “and did not even know it.”
Ask Why
McKinley’s fix starts with a single reframe, ask why. A direct why, aimed at someone deep in delivery, can trigger defensiveness, itself a symptom of tunnel vision. Approach it with curiosity instead of audit, and people answer differently. She also recommends anchoring targets to context before judging anyone against them. A project built to win future capability should not be graded like routine, fixed-price delivery. Making that distinction explicit, and revisiting it, protects a project manager from being punished for succeeding at the wrong goal.
The most achievable action for any program manager is a short, recurring conversation built around three questions: Is the current level of urgency and self-sacrifice warranted? Where is the opportunity in this problem, not just the cost? And what has quietly become “the expectation” that nobody agreed to?
McKinley’s own habit, treating every setback, including financial loss, as an opportunity, keeps the mind clear enough to think. “It distances you from the emotional aspect of it,” she said, “but it also helps to build clarity of what we can all gain from this.”
The Price of Looking Closely
The research supports the instinct to look past the scorecard. Christina Maslach’s research frames burnout as exhaustion paired with cynicism and a drop in a person’s own sense of effectiveness, not simple tiredness.
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety helps explain why people stay quiet about being overloaded until the problem is expensive to fix.
Shelley Taylor’s tend-and-befriend research adds another layer: under stress, people often reach for connection and protect others before they protect themselves, which may explain why a stressed project manager quietly takes on more, rather than asking for relief.
The business case sits in risk. Gallup research finds that employees who experience frequent burnout are 2.6 times as likely to be actively job hunting. This is a direct threat to continuity when the person considering leaving owns your critical path. A project manager who cannot see their own risk because they are buried in it, is a continuity risk, not a personnel footnote.
Replacing a project manager is not cheap. Gallup has cited a broad range for replacement cost, one-half to two times a departing employee’s annual salary, depending on role and circumstances. Set against that, the price of fixing this is a handful of short conversations, provided leadership actually acts on what those conversations surface.
The safeguard is simple. Assume everyone is doing their best with what they currently understand, then work to change what they understand. As McKinley put it, recalling a moment that reset her own thinking: “Your procrastination yesterday does not constitute an emergency for me today.” Applied consistently, that sentence may be the cheapest risk-reduction tool a program manager has.
Hadon McKinley
Hadon McKinley is an executive coach and former U.S. Air Force navigator who works with leaders on sustainable performance and recovery from burnout. She is currently completing a master’s degree in biomedical neuroscience.
Megan Lynch
Megan Lynch is a Strategic Advisor and Independent Consultant who guides leaders through pivotal moments with a focus on launching new programs that align strategy with execution. She is also a Senior Partner and Head of Project Intelligence at Freshriver.ai, where she helps organizations in regulated industries implement precision AI for mission-critical workflows.
As Founding Editor of Woven Leadership (https://wovenleadership.substack.com/), Megan publishes on how to go beyond tools and templates to explore the personal and organizational dynamics, and hard-won strategies that determine whether program and project leadership creates value. A former Senior Program Manager at Booz Allen Hamilton, she holds an MBA from George Mason University, and the PgMP and PMP certifications from PMI. Find her on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganktlynch/) and Substack (https://wovenleadership.substack.com/).
