The Importance of Including Difficult People
There’s a common dynamic in teams that I will illustrate with an example. None of the names are real and this could be one of many teams I have worked with over the years.
I was brought in to help the team deal with a difficult individual, Paul. Paul objected to almost every suggestion made by his teammates, quick to explain why their proposed solution wouldn’t work.
How To Solve a Problem Like Paul
The team had been tasked with building a large and difficult product on a short time frame. As they started working, it became clear that it was a more complex problem than originally anticipated.
Team members had reacted in a variety of ways. One person was mapping all the things that might possibly need to be done in the next three years. Two were trying to figure out how little could be done to satisfy senior leadership, knowing that they weren’t going to solve the problem. Three were busy with low value tasks and doing only what they were told to do. Paul consistently asked the team to face the reality of the problem they had been task with solving.
The System Has a Problem; The Difficult Person is the Clue
The problem wasn’t Paul.
The identified problem was that Paul was frustrated. He was being unskillful in his communication because of his stress level. When he is calm, optimistic, and trusts that his team is moving forward, Paul is a deeply thoughtful and kind person with the intellectual capacity to handle massively complicated systems with nuance, a huge amount of domain-specific knowledge, and a highly creative problem-solver. Exactly who the team needed. Under stress, though, his tension leaked through his tone of voice and choice of vocabulary.
The problem was the pressure to pretend that the problem could be solved in the desired time frame with the allocated resources.
Every person on that team was technically up to the challenge in front of them. Every one of them was reacting to the pressure on the team with a classic human response to overwhelm. And none of them were behaving effectively.
Juan was trying to do it all himself, responding to the discomfort of uncertainty by trying to plan for all possible contingencies. He worked late into too many nights, feeling more and more alone and resentful.
Stephan and Yulia were displaying fawning behaviour, twisting themselves into knots to avoid being punished. In many cases, people develop this behaviour having given up raising issues with leadership after too many bad experiences.
The others had disengaged. Seeing no hope for success, they weren’t even trying to solve the problem.
So Why had Paul been Identified as the Problem?
The way Paul responds to stress is seen as a problem in his organization.
Juan was responding in the ways that are are rewarded in large organizations. Producing detailed upfront requirements and contingency plans helps anxious bureaucrats relax. His response was seen as exemplary despite most of it being a waste of time.
Yulia and Stephan were playing the game by the rules: don’t rock the boat. They were set up for failure on the project, so they were trying to win the good employee game despite the project parameters.
And the disengaged team members got lumped in with the rest of the low engagement scores that HR reported were typical of the industry and therefore to be expected.
Paul was different. Paul let his frustration show. When he was labelled difficult, Paul was being used as a scapegoat. He was the person who was pressing the team to look at the hard questions. By making Paul’s frustration the problem, the team avoided the hard work the team had been asked to do.
The team was overwhelmed and reacting in a totally normal, human ways to that overwhelm.
Without Paul’s voice, no one outside the team would have heard the frustration. The first sign of problems would have been failure to deliver. Paul’s difficult behaviour was a symptom of the system’s stress.
As a side note, it is common for QA or Security to be given the Paul role in an engineering organization and HR, Finance, or Legal to be given it on a company-wide scale.
The Solution: Get Curious About the Difficult Behaviour
Most people’s brains shift from “this is an exciting challenge I want to work on” to “this is too hard, so I won’t bother” when the gut instinct assesses likelihood of success as under 85%. Knowing this, when faced with a team that is struggling with motivation or feels underwater, I am trying to shift that gut instinct.
I have two levers.
Make the immediate problem smaller so it feels doable with the team’s current sense of competence.
Increase the team’s sense of competence.
Once the balance between the scope of the project and the team’s sense of competence moves back to the “we can do this” side of the line, team behaviours typically shift into forward motion without further assistance.
The relationship problem in this case was a symptom of an overwhelming task. But hiding underneath was another relationship challenge: the team didn’t feel safe telling leadership they couldn’t make the original deadline. If the team had been able to work with leadership to adjust the scope or timing of the project when it was first known to be more difficult than estimated, the paralyzing overwhelm could have been avoided.