Exclude a team member – and you’re an idiot
Roy Osherove filed under Anti Patterns | Growing People | Learning Phase Don’t exclude people in your team. It’s important that all people in your team are treated as equals and with respect. It may feel like a “duh” moment, but people get offended, deeply if they are left out of the loop.
Also, what kind of message does this send to the rest of the team?
“It’s OK – you can ignore or exclude that person too!”
If you have a team member that you find it hard to deal with, the last thing you want to do is exclude them from important discussions, team standup meetings, or even lunch.
You will only be making it worse.
Be brave and confront your fear of getting that person on board. Whatever your problem is with them, remember it is your problem with them. you have to solve it, because no one will do it magically for you.
No, firing is almost never the right answer. Firing someone means you’ve given up on yourself about growing that person and making them the dev that you want them to be. You get to fire people after at least 4 months of trying. Make that your hard line. Stick by it.
In those months – you will make that person part of the team, and teach them (if you need to) how to act as part of the team. You excluding them from the team activities (even one or two every once in a while) just helps them get more entrenched in their belief that they should be different and not act as part of the team.
Reader Comments (4)
Roy, Great Post! I agree with your thoughts. Most often its seen that if there are differences from the team member, then the immediate action is firing. I think true leadership comes in play in these kind of situation. The are some ways to try and resolve these differences before taking the final action. One way is to have a one to one talk with that person and try to understand his/her perspective, if this does not work out then one could also engage this person in some situations and ask what would he/she do in your place. Of course these are just 2 examples, the situations and people might be subjective. I was reading a post Is ‘How’ a Competitive Advantage? by Vineet Nayar, where he talks about how you can lead your team? http://ow.ly/1Pr5b
Thanks
Kapil
@kapilpoojari
I generally agree, but there should be a sister article called "If you don't _care_ about being part of the team, and completely ignore their attempts to include you, then you're also an idiot". Teams should bend over backwards to gel with each other, but if someone consistently resists, ignores the team rules, doesn't follow established process, and makes no attempt to learn the specific coding standards for that team/project, then its clear where the problem lies. And in small companies at least, we can't subsidize that behavior... not when there are plenty of talented people out there that _would_ do those things!
Maybe I'm focusing on an extreme counter example... team leads should start out with your attitude and only adopt mine once they veer far away from the happy path :)
Seth - good idea. I'll post about the counter example.
Agreed! I've taken the easy way out once and I still regret it. Firing a person can have a really bad effect on the remaining team's performance, in ways that is hard to foresee. On the other hand, if you succeed in growing a "problematic" team member - even just a little - it can have a profound positive effect. And, it's a lot more fun.
So, these days I try a lot harder to incorporate these individuals rather than excluding them.
Thank you for a great post!