Dealing with Bad Team Players Who Are Highly Competent

Chris is an executive that manages teams of engineers who require strong technical competence. He'd received a great deal of feedback about one of his teams who were not working well at delivering their work to other groups in the business and in turn were viewed as less than impressive employees. Chris was struggling with how to deal with the situation because he knew that these team members did valuable work but were not good at dealing with others' needs. Because people experienced the negative interpersonal skills of these team members and didn't feel like they cared about the rest of the organization, people were unable to see the good work this team was able to accomplish. The culture of the organization was that you needed to be able to perform or you get fired. Chris came into the course believing that he was going to have to fire these team members. After going through the course and reinforcing that they did have valuable strengths he tried to think of a more abundant approach to help this team succeed before letting them go. Chris came up with an idea to see if he could deliver the hard message but still show that he believed in the team's success if only they would make a few changes. He brought them to a Chinese restaurant known for good food but intentionally bad service. Servers were rude and would throw the plate of food the last few feet onto the table causing some of the food to spill. The team did enjoy the food but thought it was odd that he would bring them to this particular restaurant as the service made it not as enjoyable of an experience. Chris told them the feedback he'd been receiving and gave them a few examples of how their behavior in the business was like the service in the restaurant. Their product (the food) was great but people didn't recognize it because of their delivery. This really impacted the team and they realized that they were part of something bigger and understood how some of their behaviors would diminish the important work they were doing. They met as a team without Chris and made some rules they wanted to implement as a group. They believed these rules would address the issue. Because they created the rules and the new approach they all had buy-in and took their new task very seriously. Meanwhile, Chris started to hear positive feedback about the team's new behavior from others in the business.

Questions to Consider:

What are creative or different ways you can help people to understand the impact they are having on others so that they understand why it is important to make personal changes?

Do you see the positive in others and build from that or do you only focus on what others do wrong? How can you help leverage people's strengths but also help them to improve upon their weaknesses?