>What I'd like to hear from the OP is ways to counteract this kind of behavior, I suspect there might not be a way to do it if you're a peer, only if you're that person's boss.
I think the article misses an important point - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance (Hanlon's Razor). Many of these behaviours are not malicious, but are borne out of lack of experience, fear of failure, shyness or just plain misunderstanding. As a peer, you can certainly assist with these issues. It should always be your first assumption when appraoching the situation.
However, if you are dealing with a verified malicious/manipulative/lazy person I think its management's responsibility to do something about these behaviours. As a peer I think you can be proactive to expose some of these behaviours and the impact they have on productivity and team morale.
The key word is transparency.
Transparency to these people is like sunlight to a vampire. They will do anything to avoid it. The tightrope act is highlighting these problematic behaviours to management or other peers without being a dick about it. A key part of this is challenging the behaviour rather than the person. Tackle issues as if they are shared problems you need to solve rather than 'you versus me'.
Here are some approaches that have worked for me:
>Be Bossy and Critical
This is easy. If someone tries to palm off their work to me, or give I simply ask them to run it past management first as it may impact the deadline for other tasks. 90% of the time they never ask. The 'Oh my god, whats up with the reports? Am I going to have to do this myself??' attack is even easier to handle if you can exercise a bit of self-control and avoid getting defensive. Just reply via email (and CC the project manager) 'Yes, thankyou for offering! I'm snowed under with my allocated tasks so we'll have a better result if you're able to finish these reports'.
By thanking them for their generous offer, you turn the whole situation on its head. What a team player!
> Shamelessly Self Promote
Line up the self-promoted activities with the goals of the project. If they match, well, thats ok. If they dont, ask how we as a team can ensure we hit our deadlines. Remember that we're all a team, and we all (management included) want to hit our deadlines. As a team, will we have to cut back on any low priority tasks? What should the team be prioritising? Team Team Team.
> Distract with Arguments about Minutiae
Acknowledge the minutiae, do not dismiss it. Then ask how they see this impacting the project deliverables. Remember with project teams (and particularly software teams) each individual is focussed on their part of the puzzle....and that small piece becomes their whole world. I dont see this behaviour as malicious. Just a side effect of the tunnel vision required for difficult programming tasks. It helps to 'come up for air' every now and then and see the big picture. That puts these minutiae issues into perspective. Ask them to raise it as a discussion item post-deadline. Share your own little minutiae problem and how much it annoys you, but describe how you live with it because ultimately there are more important things to worry about. In my experience, this minutiae thing is not about laziness, its about team empathy and acknowledgement of effort.
> Time It So You Look Good (Or Everyone Else Looks Bad)
This is one of my pet hates. I work with an international team and some people really abuse the time difference with this scam. When two people on the opposite sides of the globe do this, its a thing of beauty. 4 days of non-work to restore a SQL .bak file. To be honest I dont know how to deal with this aside from daily progress reports which expose how little work is getting done. Explicity stating 'if you encounter a problem that stops you, just put it aside as we dont have the time to lose' sometimes helps.
> Plan Excuses Ahead of Time
I've noticed that sometimes this is not about excuses, its about a lack of confidence. Perhaps bad time syncing in linux can cause big problems? Who knows? Many people are scared of breaking things they do not understand. This is a reasonable attitude. Just need to encourage pro-active thinking. Ask them what they did instead? Perhaps set up a couple of VMs that people can play with and not worry about breaking? We've had alot of success with this approach. We had a support team who couldnt solve any customer tickets because they were terrified of 'messing with the system' and hadnt received proper training. After a couple of months active encouragement, a no-blame approach to problems, and a few short training sessions focussing on how to diagnose issues rather than following a script....they became incredibly effective. Now they'll jump right in, have a go, if they cant fix it, they'll describe what they did and where they got stuck. Ticket turnaround time dropped by about 75%.
> Take Credit in Non-Disprovable Ways
I dont really know how to handle this. It used to worry me but I dont really care any more. I've had the most indivual success when I remain team focussed instead of expending mental energy worrying about my personal brand. Granted, I now work in a large organisation. I've seen this behaviour in a small company (ie a manager/owner 'king of the castle' egomaniac) and it was terminal. Time to polish up the CV.
I created an account just to upvote this, I think this is brilliantly put :)
When I started my career in software at a large corp, it took me four years to figure why passive behavior was pervasive in my team and how I could counter it. I can humbly attest to a lot of the ideas in your post as they did work for me as well.
I also feel that most people do not feel very comfortable in interfering with team dynamics in a peer role as they mostly consider it a job for the managers. But in my opinion, one is entitled to work towards fostering an environment he/she would like to be in. Whether that is benefiting or hurting the team is a judgement the management can make and act on it.
Thank you for your kind words. I strongly agree with you about fostering a positive work environment at the peer level. I think it compliments rather than interferes with the responsibilities of management. I've found that simply maintaining a strong team focus and a generous attitude to knowledge sharing makes a big difference. I'm glad to see some research that backs this up:
> Transparency to these people is like sunlight to a vampire. They will do anything to avoid it.
I think it's the opposite. People like that - I think michaelochurch calls them psychopaths - like, in my experience, be transparent (or at least, appear to be transparent, but in any case they will openly promote transparency). They will always have something to say. "I did this and that to make the system better and to share better information between us." They will be able to talk at length about what they are doing and how it will make everybody's life better.
Certainly these people are communicative, but that doesnt make them transparent. In my mind transparency implies an outsider having a reasonably accurate picture of the true state of affairs. These people (some of them psychopaths) will go to extraordinary lengths to convince as many people as possible that they are doing the great thing.
>They will be able to talk at length about what they are doing and how it will make everybody's life better
There is no crime in this. Everyone should think about these things. But I would argue that the malicious people need to spend more time communicating with many people to manage their perception - its almost like a propaganda war.
>openly promote transparency
This is vital information. If they openly promote transparency, you can use this attitude to suggest and implement real transparency in systems and workflows. Most of these people will recoil in horror at the idea of being exposed.
You are correct in that transparency is to those people like light is to vampires. If you (or anyone else) is interested in the academic treatment of these 'games' (that is what they are called), read Eric Berne's short book "Games People Play". In the book it is explained how what you called "transparency" can be achieved by giving the player the "antithesis" to his game.
Can you recommend further academic publications or research on this type of toxic behaviour in the workplace? What is the term for these people? Some of them are psychopaths but that seems a bit extreme for this range of behavioural traits.
Sociopaths, not psychopaths. Psychopaths lack planning ability and often exhibit poor impulse control. They're often pretty easy to spot since their behavior is generally obvious.
Sociopaths, on the other hand, are very much worse. They are clever enough to "pass" and to create and pursue long term plans.
I have unfortunately worked with one guy that seemed to me to be pretty far along on that continuum of sociopathy. He was constantly backstabbing and manipulating and really fucked me over hard, all because he saw it as a way to get ahead. He lied, dissembled, and only in a truly transparent group setting was I able to call his actions out.
I went on Christmas vacation with everything "good" with my team and came back to my manager asking me why my module was "completely fubared," according to my colleague. So I sat down with my manager and my accuser and went through the code line-by-line to explain the function and reasoning behind the code, then showed it working in our codebase repo. My accuser, with nothing else to throw at me said that he "had been confused by the names of the classes."
He still managed to convince management that I didn't deserve a bonus and he did, despite his poor track record. THAT is the danger of these sorts of people, and a hard lesson learned that I _have_ to play politics enough that I am sure I am not being thrown under the bus rather than just focusing on being a creative and productive member of the team.
While my manager and the accuser were good buddies through most of the project, the accuser's true nature began to shine through and now he's moved across the country, presumably with new bridges to burn.
I think the article misses an important point - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance (Hanlon's Razor). Many of these behaviours are not malicious, but are borne out of lack of experience, fear of failure, shyness or just plain misunderstanding. As a peer, you can certainly assist with these issues. It should always be your first assumption when appraoching the situation.
However, if you are dealing with a verified malicious/manipulative/lazy person I think its management's responsibility to do something about these behaviours. As a peer I think you can be proactive to expose some of these behaviours and the impact they have on productivity and team morale.
The key word is transparency.
Transparency to these people is like sunlight to a vampire. They will do anything to avoid it. The tightrope act is highlighting these problematic behaviours to management or other peers without being a dick about it. A key part of this is challenging the behaviour rather than the person. Tackle issues as if they are shared problems you need to solve rather than 'you versus me'.
Here are some approaches that have worked for me:
>Be Bossy and Critical
This is easy. If someone tries to palm off their work to me, or give I simply ask them to run it past management first as it may impact the deadline for other tasks. 90% of the time they never ask. The 'Oh my god, whats up with the reports? Am I going to have to do this myself??' attack is even easier to handle if you can exercise a bit of self-control and avoid getting defensive. Just reply via email (and CC the project manager) 'Yes, thankyou for offering! I'm snowed under with my allocated tasks so we'll have a better result if you're able to finish these reports'.
By thanking them for their generous offer, you turn the whole situation on its head. What a team player!
> Shamelessly Self Promote
Line up the self-promoted activities with the goals of the project. If they match, well, thats ok. If they dont, ask how we as a team can ensure we hit our deadlines. Remember that we're all a team, and we all (management included) want to hit our deadlines. As a team, will we have to cut back on any low priority tasks? What should the team be prioritising? Team Team Team.
> Distract with Arguments about Minutiae
Acknowledge the minutiae, do not dismiss it. Then ask how they see this impacting the project deliverables. Remember with project teams (and particularly software teams) each individual is focussed on their part of the puzzle....and that small piece becomes their whole world. I dont see this behaviour as malicious. Just a side effect of the tunnel vision required for difficult programming tasks. It helps to 'come up for air' every now and then and see the big picture. That puts these minutiae issues into perspective. Ask them to raise it as a discussion item post-deadline. Share your own little minutiae problem and how much it annoys you, but describe how you live with it because ultimately there are more important things to worry about. In my experience, this minutiae thing is not about laziness, its about team empathy and acknowledgement of effort.
> Time It So You Look Good (Or Everyone Else Looks Bad)
This is one of my pet hates. I work with an international team and some people really abuse the time difference with this scam. When two people on the opposite sides of the globe do this, its a thing of beauty. 4 days of non-work to restore a SQL .bak file. To be honest I dont know how to deal with this aside from daily progress reports which expose how little work is getting done. Explicity stating 'if you encounter a problem that stops you, just put it aside as we dont have the time to lose' sometimes helps.
> Plan Excuses Ahead of Time
I've noticed that sometimes this is not about excuses, its about a lack of confidence. Perhaps bad time syncing in linux can cause big problems? Who knows? Many people are scared of breaking things they do not understand. This is a reasonable attitude. Just need to encourage pro-active thinking. Ask them what they did instead? Perhaps set up a couple of VMs that people can play with and not worry about breaking? We've had alot of success with this approach. We had a support team who couldnt solve any customer tickets because they were terrified of 'messing with the system' and hadnt received proper training. After a couple of months active encouragement, a no-blame approach to problems, and a few short training sessions focussing on how to diagnose issues rather than following a script....they became incredibly effective. Now they'll jump right in, have a go, if they cant fix it, they'll describe what they did and where they got stuck. Ticket turnaround time dropped by about 75%.
> Take Credit in Non-Disprovable Ways
I dont really know how to handle this. It used to worry me but I dont really care any more. I've had the most indivual success when I remain team focussed instead of expending mental energy worrying about my personal brand. Granted, I now work in a large organisation. I've seen this behaviour in a small company (ie a manager/owner 'king of the castle' egomaniac) and it was terminal. Time to polish up the CV.