Project Leaders are Responsible when Teams are Dysfunctional
March 18th, 2003 by HalTeam dysfunction is a serious concern for project leaders. Scott Robinson writing Learning to play well together: Negotiating personality conflicts, one of fifteen articles he published in the last three weeks, sets out to address what team leaders can do.
Robinson suggests an indirect approach for dealing with personality conflicts among team members. While he identifies the consequences of those conflicts to the team and the firm, he fails to prescribe actions for eliminating the conflict. Instead he recommends:
- Create a programming trio
Introduce a senior third party to subtly raise the standard of behavior. - Try multimodal communication
Resort to email and IM to keep them separate but still communicating. - Go public
Use good natured ribbing to call attention to the behavior. - Read 'em the Riot Act
Last resort. Don't be afraid to use bold and italics.
AARGH! These aren't the actions of leaders.
Robinson should stick to what he knows — XML, Java, data handling, etc. Readers sounded off with dissenting views. Scott, take a lesson from Patrick Lencioni in his book The Five Dysfunctions of Teams. You don't have personality conflicts; you have dysfunctional behavior.
One of the roles of the leader is to declare acceptable standards of behavior for the team. When team or individual behavior is inconsistent with the declared standards then the standards are clarified and the individuals instructed to adjust behavior. Continued poor behavior would be grounds for removing the individual from the team. This in not about negotiation. This is not about personality. It is only about behavior.
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March 18th, 2003 at 5:03 pm
This is what happens when programmers read POP Psychology and think a few recipes is all that is to behaviour management. There are unfortunately too many Scott Robinson still around