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Chapter 11
Dealing with Difficult People

Nowhere is it written that you have to get along with everyone. There are people in the world who should not, who must not, be on any team -- ever. And they are not especially unusual.

Last chapter talked about people whose intentions toward teaming were OK, but whose ability to team successfully was hampered by differences of opinion and approach. This chapter is about people whom nature did not inculcate with the instinct or the will to team.

They are not necessarily bad people – though some (the dark angels) are truly bad. All require action on the team's part – either distancing, discipline, or banishment.

     Team Jerks

On any given day, we can all be jerks -- rude people who are unaware how they come across. But the true team jerk goes beyond occasional jerkiness to full-blown jerkhood. They are jerks par excellence. Compared to them, we are amateurs.

A team jerk is usually its most talented member. He or she may have made some very important contributions to the enterprise. Their specialty is ideas -- new technologies, new products, new processes, new applications, new combinations of existing things, marketing ideas. Extraordinarily bright and creative, they are high-achieving dynamos when motivated, giving off ideas the way regular folk emit carbon dioxide.

Take Bert (please!). He is a prima donna about his talent. He won't play by the rules other team members follow. He demands that other people attend to him, while he ignores them. Communication with him has eroded to the point where the team simply ignores him -- yet hopes he includes them the next time a great idea comes to him. When team members do try to include him in things, he brushes them off.

A good archetype for Bert is the software programmer who is a genius with C++, but has horrendous social skills. You hate to lose his talent, but you could sure do without his arrogance, his eccentricities, and his contempt. Wouldn't hurt if he bathed a bit more often, either.

What can you do with a guy like Bert?

First, acknowledge that his personality is not his fault. None of us asks to be born with the precise set of talents and peculiarities we get. The jerk is often blessed with great creativity, but cursed with a crummy personality.

There are two strong opposing forces in the creative person. The one force is that person's internal standards, which are precious and, in many ways, the secret to that person's success. At all costs, the creative jerk tells himself, he must be true to that inner measure. The other force is one we are more familiar with -- the drive we all have for recognition by others. The problem is that the two forces don't reconcile all that easily. Especially bright people have to struggle to know which drive to honor at any given moment.

Second, appreciate that what you see is probably not all there is. People who act arrogant often have profound insecurities. People who laugh in your face may well cry when you are gone. These people may simply be failing to adequately communicate what is going on inside them. The sad secret of many creative types is that they are experiencing more stress and more pain than other team members.

In addition, an individual who is susceptible to the terrible pressures of the workplace is probably not immune to pressures on the home front, either. It's possible that behind the superficial inappropriate behavior may lurk problems far more difficult to solve -- marital conflicts, chemical abuse, mental illness even. Historically, creative geniuses have always had a knack for turning their right-brain talents against themselves.

Third, see if the team itself is helping to create the problem. Maybe team members have unconsciously "outed" the jerk because he is cut from such a different bolt of cloth than they are. Or maybe the team rules and policies are too narrow to accommodate a personality with extra, um, verve.

Having made these adaptations, however, you still have the problem of Bert being Bert. You can change the whole world to suit some people, and they will continue to be jerks.

Here's a radical idea: Why not ask him what he would like? Ask if he wants to continue as a team member. Ask him if there is anything he would like done differently -- whom to report to, how and how often to meet, whether to work side by side or from remote locations.

Make clear that you are searching for a solution that enables him to keep being himself, and doing the quality of work he does, and making some kind of contribution to the team -- and that alleviates the personality clashes that are making everyone miserable.

If he perceives himself to be at war with the team, he may be very wary of such a pow-wow. So you must be very supporting, yet very candid with him.

The best solution is to put distance between him and the team. Set him apart from the core team, as a valued resource team member. Make him a unit unto himself – a team of one -- with a dotted-line relationship to the team, as a reference source, sounding board, or technology guru. Set him up as a one-man skunkworks. Give him an office in a separate building, or on a separate continent, even. Buy him some bunny slippers and make a telecommuter out of him.

Be careful about sending your genius off to the jungle by himself, however. The idea of separation may sound good to both him and to the team, but it may backfire. It's very likely that Bert needs human contact to keep from going completely insane, or depressed. The team he derides and ignores may be his lifeline.

Perhaps the best solution is for the team to accept the fact that it needs Bert and Bert, though he gives little indication of this, needs the team. Why not make a concerted effort to give Bert what he needs -- admiration, support, and sympathy? Just because he doesn't act especially human doesn't mean he is immune to human feelings. We all need a kind word from time to time, and the occasional reassuring pat on the back.

Now that you have his attention, let your newfound appreciation be the basis on which a new alliance can be built between the individual and you. Once he sees you are a true fan, you can do something. Acknowledge his talents, but put an arm around his shoulder and say, "Hey, if we're going to let that talent blossom, we have to do something about these self-defeating behaviors."

Don't apply the medicine, the behavioral change, until you have first proffered the candy of encouragement and fellow-feeling.

And when the time comes to name those self-defeating obnoxious behaviors, be specific. It's no good using value-laden, broadbrush terms like jerk, arrogant, obtuse sonofabitch, etc.

Instead, say:

ƒ      "It appears to me that you shoot from the hip during the meetings, and you hurt people's feelings and make enemies."

ƒ      "It appears to me that you can't take criticism. When I asked you about your design at Thursday's meeting, you got up and left the room."

ƒ      "It seems as if you like making cruel jokes, and you don't know how badly that makes people feel."

ƒ      "Julie, the transcriptionist, quit because you yelled at her."

ƒ      "I left six messages on your voicemail and you never got back to me."

ƒ      "You play Cubanismo! when the rest of us are trying to read professional journals."

The creative high-achiever has a hot pilot light. He or she burns hotter and works harder than most people. And where all of us have an inner core that we descend into from time to time in our lives, the creative high-achiever virtually camps out there, intensely focused on whatever it is that he or she is striving to create or achieve. They are almost of another race than the rest of us -- us being turtles and them being racehorses. Small wonder if adapting to our hobbling pace causes them problems.

One thing about them is that you can't help them by slowing them down. Stress for them may actually be lower when their activity level is hyper or beyond. Never tell a racehorse to walk a few laps. Creatives and high achievers are often subspecies of workaholics, and workaholics have a way of dying within a year of retirement.

Can people, whether they are genius-jerks or whatever, really get hold of their basic natures and change them? How many teams have ever witnessed the kind of transformation necessary to turn around a career?

And even when the results are good, the process may not be over. A team member who has alienated everyone on the team will find that his transformation is not universally trusted. Like the boy who cried wolf too often, the genius-no-longer-(such)-a-jerk will find that many colleagues are hard to win over. There is a degree to which people almost prefer the two-dimensionality of poor behavior to the unpredictability of more sensitive behavior. So more has to change sometimes than just the individual. Sometimes the team has to change with him (or her).

     Team blowhards

In the old Aesop fairy tale, one thing stood between a houseful of mice and complete happiness -- the cat. So the mice met and voted to eliminate the danger forever, by tying a bell around the cat's neck. With the bell in place, the cat would be unable to sneak up on and devour another mouse. Only problem was getting volunteers to tie the bell on.

The same goes with teams. Nearly every team has one member, either a leader or a peer, who cannot seem to help dominating team activities. Even when time is short, and the agenda is crowded, these blowhards feel they have to get their share of attention. Team blowhards talk too often, too long, are impossible to shut up, enjoy initiating distractions, and just generally dominate team proceedings.

What can the team do to suppress these people? Putting a bell on them doesn't work -- we saw it tried once, and, well, the blowhards just take it off. But there are other solutions.

The most conventional solutions are managerial in nature. They are old-fashioned, autocratic, pre-team remedies by which the team leader shuts up the noisy and encourages the quiet. The most drastic is to simply terminate the overbearing offender. Termination may seem like the perfect weapon in all kinds of team personality issues, but beware. Termination:

ƒ      is unfair; you're effectively dismissing someone for overcontributing.

ƒ      is potentially litigious; nothing like a team lawsuit to bring folks together.

ƒ      subtly undermines the authority of the team leader; it shows you can't manage a simple situation.

ƒ      is inefficient; you have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, wasted a whole team member to eliminate a single flaw.

Some teams "quarantine" overbearing members; they redesignate them as wing units to get them out of the home office. But here again, keeping expressive people at home -- banning them from the regular environment -- wastes talent. Meanwhile, it's nearly always a bad idea to change a job description to suit an individual.

In meetings, some team leaders bell the bully by artificially ostracizing them from the team process, by assigning them the task of flipping the flipcharts, or manning the lightswitch at the back of the room. If a bully is talking, it is possible to talk through them -- the inappropriate sound of two voices vying for attention gets even the biggest bully's attention.

Some team leaders turn their backs to the overtalker -- you don't reinforce what you don't see. You can simply ignore them. If they are constantly raising hands, don't look their way. If they interrupt, smile and say -- "Let's look at that later."

Call on other team members to help. "Come on, gang, let's not let Audrey here do all the work. Who else has an idea? Who agrees with Audrey? Disagrees?"

If the bully seems unmoved by all these attempts, take them aside during a break and tell them in no uncertain terms: "You are dragging the group away from the agenda. If you keep this up, the team will be a joke. If you can't adjust to the agenda, you're not welcome here."

The most important tool in combating distraction is the team agenda. Make your agenda central, and stick to it at all costs. If someone goes off on a tangent, pull them back. An agenda keeps you from being the "bad person." You say, "George that is really very interesting, but it is not what we agreed to discuss today." Let the agenda take the heat for disciplining the process. You're not disagreeing -- you're just keeping things on track.

If someone is dominating, they still have to breathe. When they stop for that breath, leap in, and say, "George, that's interesting -- can we relate that back to the agenda before us?" You can also simply say, "George that's interesting, but let me hear from other people, too." And then you turn your eye contact away and poll others for opinions.

Some team leaders take preemptive action -- heading the bully off at the pass, before he or she ruins the team. The more you can do before a team get-together, hammering out an understanding of the tasks at hand, the better the meeting will go. Likewise, he said, there are post-meeting strategies to held ensure meeting success. He who controls the minutes controls the meeting.

There are social solutions to the problem of blowhards -- ways of communicating that overtalkers need to turn it down, and undertalkers need to summon the courage to speak. Consider throwing the bully a bone. People who want attention can sometimes be satisfied -- or frightened away -- with a little. Say, "Good idea, Jack. Anybody else?" It doesn't have to be a big bone. But never appease a bully with flattery ("Roy, you have so many wonderful ideas!"). Positive reinforcement only invites more of the reinforced behavior.

The worst person to have in a team is the negative thinker. "We tried that, and it didn't work," is this person's bludgeon. One tactic is to turn that person's negativity around: "How would you make it work this time?" "How can we overcome those obstacles?"

The imbalance between shy people and demonstrative people can be a major problem for team interaction. How do you achieve the team ideal -- everyone participating, everyone contributing -- if one person drowns out three others? A skilled team manager knows how to keep from being steamrollered by compulsive hard-driving Type A behavior; by authoritarian personalities, who think it is just, fitting and natural that others should obey them; and by "Machiavellian manipulators," people who are on the lookout for a neck to sharpen their axe on
-- yours.

Throw in the cultural and attitudinal deference often given to males, to people with booming voices, to tall people, and the natural advantage of seniority on the company flow-chart, and there is a lot to overcome.

Team leaders need to plan solutions to these problems in advance. Structure the information so that people know, when the team meeting starts, what is expected of them, what is permitted, and what is out of line. Announce that you want everyone's input, not just one or two people's. With that understanding in mind, individuals are less likely to hijack the team.

Challenge them to prove that their point of view is substantive, that they have something relevant to say, and are not just talking to hear their tongues flap. Look them dead in the eye and ask them, "If you could make your point in 25 words, what would it be?"

Try to win them to your side. "I like what you are saying, but I have only a short time to make my points here -- could I go first?" If necessary, shut the blowhard down. "I have no idea what the answer to the question of parking privileges is -- I'm here to talk about the team's strategy."

One strategy is to "equalize" group membership through something called the nominal group technique. Here the facilitator asks group members to quietly write down what their thoughts are on the coming meeting. Then the facilitator reads the ideas, and thus controls group input. This approach can be linked with electronic meeting tools, which we will discuss in a later chapter.

     Team brats

Judith Bardwick, in her book Danger in the Comfort Zone (Amacom, 1991), describes an attitude that has crept gradually into the workplace in recent years -- and one that spells unavoidable death to successful teaming. She calls the attitude entitlement. It is a team member's feeling that the rest of the team, or the organization as a whole, owes him or her membership. If entitlement is too abstract a phrase, consider the one your parents used when you acted like that at age 5 -- spoiled brat.

In the old days there was no spoiled brat syndrome because no organization spoiled its workers, except for the few lucky ones at the top. But in our century there has slowly evolved a belief -- and it is shared by many nations, and many systems, from capitalism to communism -- that people have an inherent right to fair treatment, a living wage, and decent conditions.

That doesn't sound too bad. In fact, you probably want to agree that those things should be guaranteed to all people. The problem is that as these assumptions have evolved, they have become sloppy, and people -- human nature being what it is -- have taken advantage. Lots of people in lots of organizations decided that the new contract between organizations and team members should put the entire onus for doing on the organization, and none on the team member.

People too often are too comfortable and held to too little account. For years, people have been succeeding individually without necessarily contributing to the success of their teams.

Brattism says: "I have what I have because the team owes it to me.
I get it simply by existing, not by doing." Spoiled Brat Syndrome happens at every level. It is the CEO holding out for a $5 million bonus and a golden parachute compensation plan, despite unprofitability for investors and ruthless downsizing for workers. It is the shortsighted investor, only interested in what an investment nets for him, not in what the business makes or does. It is the perks and plush carpets of Congressional offices during budgetary cutbacks. It is unions demanding 95 percent of salary for workers when they are not working.

At the team level, brattism is team members waiting for someone else to show leadership, to volunteer, to share information, to take chances. It is people hiding behind functions ("I'm in marketing, you need to talk to sales"). It is complaining about compensation when the team has not produced anything worthwhile for the organization. It is teams with poorly formed objectives and goals performing pointless tasks they know have no value or utility, all the while insisting they are burning the midnight oil.

The terrible irony is that the utopian idea of providing a more secure life for workers has too often undermined the American dream. Brattism is a primary cause of bloat, bureaucracy, turf wars, indifferent service and shoddy product quality.

It is also the cause of a shift in our character, of our ethics, a point Bardwick made in her book. When we are not held to account for our actions, it is easy to rationalize our shortcomings:

No one else is working hard, so why should I?
If no one catches you, you didn't anything wrong.
A job not worth doing is not worth doing well.

How does a team combat incipient brattism? Through vigilance and intolerance. By keeping the team on track to achieve their stated objectives, and by making sure those objectives are actually achievable.

Team members slip into brattism for two main reasons -- the team's objectives are unachievable, or they are too easily achieved. Teams require just the right degree of engagement, or members rebel and drift into defiant anti-team attitudes.

Restoring a team from brattism to honest engagement doesn't happen without leadership. The first order for leaders is to clear away any vestige of brattism at the top. No team is going to come clean and shed its bad attitudes while the team at the top is permitted to continue with its own.

The leader then administers pressure. People perform or they depart. But the pressure must be to achieve a very specific outcome. Rewards must be for achievements that matter, not digging and refilling holes. People must feel their work is important. People who cannot make the crossing to be more accountable even with training must be winnowed out and replaced.

The passage from an attitude of brattism to earning is not an easy one. It requires pain and anxiety, by definition. Brattism is like dope that numbs us to the twinges of reality. But at the end of this anxious exodus is the possibility of great success and great fulfillment. The feeling of achieving this possible success makes the aches and pains worthwhile.

     Dark angels

There are people out there who should not be on any team, anywhere, ever. We are not referring to reclusives or the terminally shy. They can participate. We are talking about the organizational equivalent of the undead. If you follow the medical model, you would say that are sociopathic. If you are a strict moralist you will call them evil. If you lean more toward the supernatural, you might call them dark angels.

A dark angel can take several forms:

ƒ      the addict, who acts crazy because of some personal problem

ƒ      the ogre, who acts out of antisocial rage

ƒ      the crook, who thinks nothing of crossing ethical lines

ƒ      the fanatic, who puts achieving his objectives above all rules and policies

Here's what a dark angel can do.

A team of five was set up to study the feasibility of direct marketing a new product. Everyone on the team seemed to have a reasonable amount of team spirit, except for Roger. Which was strange because Roger, a mail order whiz, begged to be part of the team. Later, the team learned he had mortally damaged his current team, and it was time to move on.

Then the sabotage began. Reports that had been carefully proofread went out with embarrassing errors. Schedules that had been carefully synchronized were now way off -- people began showing up for meetings on the wrong day, or for meetings that the other party was unaware of. The networking software went down. Even the petty cash account was off, by almost $50.

Everyone was confused. At first it seemed like phenomenally bad luck. But after a crucial file disappeared from the server hard disk, they began pointing fingers. When accused, Roger gave them his best, "What? Me?" face, denied everything, and declared he was deeply offended at any suggestion he would undermine the team. And hadn't his schedule been shuffled as well? He was the victim, not the perpetrator.

He was persuasive. It wasn't until a bit of e-mail from one of Roger's previous team members surfaced, asking if the team were experiencing any data problems, that Roger was confronted again. No one could understand his motive. It wasn't for promotion, or to make himself look good, or personal vendetta. He was just a crazy, rotten guy. An ogre, who hated his life, his team, his job -- everything. An unapologetic wrecker of well-laid plans.

People in human resources consulting will tell you how to handle all kinds of personnel issues. But no one's got much of a handle on what to do with a dark angel like Roger. Dark angels are the beasties in the New Age box, the team poison pill. The brave new world we've been ushering in didn't plan on their being there. But there they are.

There often isn't a lot of incentive to get rid of dark angels. Terminating people is confrontative, unpleasant, and potentially litigious. So we look the other way and hope the madness goes away. A team member with an addict personality may collapse from the weight of his or her own problems. A team member with an ogre personality, driven by some dark rage, may still be a good producer. Team members who go berserk and start hurling large objects about the office telekinetically -- well, who are they bothering really?

A team member who is unscrupulous or super-competitive or overzealous is doing exactly what he thinks he was hired to do. Be honest -- amoral unscrupulousness is a tried, true pathway to success in many organizations.

Explaining the ten commandments to them won't stop these people. Philosopher and social critic Scott Peck theorizes that evil is not a choice we make but an external force with its own reality, seeking opportunities, viruslike, where it can find them. And it finds them most often in isolated, alienated individuals, who are so estranged by upbringing, circumstance, or by their very nature that no act is beneath them as they roll unstoppably toward their objectives. (Scott Peck, People of the Lie, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983)

Some people you can counsel, some you can transfer to the company office in Ultima Thule. Some you can quietly let go, and let their sins paddle off to some new ship to wreck -- you may even write the delicately phrased letter of recommendation ("I cannot recommend Kennedy too highly.").

But some people, like the alien being hiding in your hold, leave you one option. A stake through the heart, before they put one through you.

 

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