Converting Date to month in COUNTIFS function

I have tried the following formulas and I can not get them to work.

I have a column of dates in the format dd/mm/yyyy

I cant make any changes to the sample data attached. It is maintained by another department at my firm and it is connected to another data source. I need to count the number of entries with responsible party pending in column M


=COUNTIFS(M:M,"pending",month(C:C),"<=3")
=COUNTIFS(M:M,"pending",TEXT(C:C,"m"),"<=3")

Any help would be appreciated.