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
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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 Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
When You Make a Mistake
- We've all made mistakes, and we'll continue to do so for as long as we live. Making mistakes is part
of being human. Still, we're often troubled by our mistakes, even when we remember that many mistakes
turn out to be great gifts. Why do we have such a hard time acknowledging mistakes?
Let Me Finish, Please
- We use meetings to exchange information and to explore complex issues. In open discussion, we tend to
interrupt each other. Interruptions can be disruptive, distracting, funny, essential, and frustratingly
common. What can we do to limit interruptions without depriving ourselves of their benefits?
- Conflict Haiku
- When tempers flare, or tension fills the air, many of us contribute to the stew, often without realizing
that we do. Here are some haiku that describe some of the many stances we choose that can lead groups
into tangles, or let those tangles persist once they form.
Some Limits of Root Cause Analysis
- Root Cause Analysis uses powerful tools for finding the sources of process problems. The approach has
been so successful that it has become a way of thinking about organizational patterns. Yet, resolving
organizational problems this way sometimes works — and sometimes fails. Why?
Accepting Reality
- Those with organizational power can sometimes forget that their power is limited to the organization.
Achieving high levels of organizational and personal performance requires a clear sense of those limits.
See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming February 26: Devious Political Tactics: Bad Decisions
- When workplace politics influences the exchanges that lead to important organizational decisions, we sometimes make decisions for reasons other than the best interests of the organization. Recognizing these tactics can limit the risk of bad decisions. Available here and by RSS on February 26.
And on March 5: On Begging the Question
- Some of our most expensive wrong decisions have come about because we've tricked ourselves as we debated our options. The tricks sometimes arise from rhetorical fallacies that tangle our thinking. One of the trickiest is called Begging the Question. Available here and by RSS on March 5.
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