When a team member actually impedes the progress of a project, and direct intervention isn't effective, reassignment and termination are the best options. But sometimes, politics intervenes — you can't reassign or terminate because of a constraint from on high. Sometimes the offender is a relative of the boss, or might be politically connected, or might be spying for a powerful political operator. In some cases, the goal might even be vendetta-driven sabotage.
When you can't terminate or reassign the offender, what are your alternatives? Frustration? Madness? Running for Congress?
Often you can accomplish the mission within the constraints you have to deal with. Here are some insights and tactics that can help.
- The problem is bigger than you think
- It's unlikely that this situation is the first or last of its kind. A repetition is probable. Even if you find a way around it this time, you might face the same problem again. Possible nightmare scenario: the person who replaces this offender is even worse.
- Consider a course change for yourself
- Since the situation is likely to repeat, ask yourself, "Do I really need this?" If you have alternatives, think about trying one of them. If you don't have alternatives, get some. Always have alternatives.
- Work the politics
- Evidently, you need stronger alliances than you now have if you want to remove the offender. Build those alliances. Even if it's too late for this incident, you'll likely need them eventually.
- If you can't remove, reconfigure
- If you can't You can often accomplish
the mission even when
you can't terminate
people who impede progressremove the offender from the team, reconfigure to insulate the offender from anything important. If you do, you'll need a plausible rationale, especially for the political operator(s) who prevented reassignment. Reconfigure in a way that seems plausible enough to divide the forces that blocked a more straightforward approach. - Find an important-sounding new task
- As you devise the reconfiguration, it's tempting to remove the person from all work. But it's far more plausible to reassign the offender to something important-sounding that isolates him or her from the critical elements of the current effort. Off site is best.
- Identify an alternative resource
- If the offender was uniquely able to do work you absolutely need done, find a consultant, or a contractor, or consider doing it yourself. Make no moves or announcements until you have an alternative resource.
- Adopt a more selective meeting attendance policy
- Shortening and focusing meeting agendas gives you an opportunity to focus the invitation lists. By omitting the tasks of offenders from agendas, you can exclude offenders from meetings.
Most important, be comfortable with a level of performance lower than you normally expect from teams you lead. This problem isn't one of your choosing, and charging the entire performance penalty to your personal account is probably unjustified. It isn't you that isn't doing your best — it's the organization that isn't doing its best. Top Next Issue
Is every other day a tense, anxious, angry misery as you watch people around you, who couldn't even think their way through a game of Jacks, win at workplace politics and steal the credit and glory for just about everyone's best work including yours? Read 303 Secrets of Workplace Politics, filled with tips and techniques for succeeding in workplace politics. More info
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Related articles
More articles on Project Management:
- Remote Facilitation in Synchronous Contexts: III
- Facilitators of synchronous distributed meetings (meetings that occur in real time, via telephone or
video) can make life much easier for everyone by taking steps before the meeting starts. Here's Part
III of a little catalog of suggestions for remote facilitators.
- Seven Ways to Get Nowhere
- Ever have the feeling that you're getting nowhere? You have the sense of movement, but you're making
no real progress towards the goal. How does this happen? What can you do about it?
- Scope Creep and Confirmation Bias
- As we've seen, some cognitive biases can contribute to the incidence of scope creep in projects and
other efforts. Confirmation bias, which causes us to prefer evidence that bolsters our preconceptions,
is one of these.
- How We Waste Time: I
- Time is the one workplace resource that's evenly distributed. Everyone gets exactly the same share,
but some use it more wisely than others. Here's Part I of a little catalog of ways we waste time.
- Planning Disappointments
- When we plan projects, we make estimates of total costs and expected delivery dates. Often these estimates
are so wrong — in the wrong direction — that we might as well be planning disappointments.
Why is this?
See also Project Management and Managing Your Boss for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
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- And on May 22: Rescheduling Collaborative Work
- Rescheduling is what we do when the schedule we have now is so desperately unachievable that we must let go of it because when we look at it we can no longer decide whether to laugh or cry. The fear is that the new schedule might come to the same end. Available here and by RSS on May 22.
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