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Category : Teamwork

Take it from Me (but it’ll cost ya….)

Posted by at 9:34 pm

I’ve worked with a guy who wasn’t interested in our team’s goals so much as what was in it for him:

  • The contacts he will make
  • The brilliant ideas he will be credited with
  • The decisions he will make
  • The amount of money he will receive

The praise and reward of the team are all his for the taking.  Or so he thought.

Milking a team for personal gain will work for a while, but in the end, it fails.  Ultimately, a team doesn’t exist for the benefit of one person.  A team exists so that a group of people can accomplish a goal that one person can’t do on his own.  All team members benefit from being on the team, not just one.

I’m not saying you should ignore your personal goals when working on a team.   Obviously, you need to get something from the team, whether it be satisfaction, goal completion, or just plain happiness.  But, if you are not at least equally aware of what the team needs, there will be consequences.  If you drain a team’s resources for your best interests, ignoring the team’s interests, teammates will notice and eventually leave you behind.

The team can live without one member, especially one that wants more than his fair share.

So that guy I worked with?  Yeah, he took a lot from many people for a while, but it cost him.   It cost him his reputation on the team.  It will likely cost him opportunities with other teams.  And the worst part (in my opinion) is that he didn’t contribute much to the team goal, so his experience was meaningless.

-Deborah Fike

Categories: Teamwork

Say that to my Face: Freeloaders

Posted by at 10:12 pm

Everybody has had a time working on a team with a freeloader.  Dead weight.  Leech.  Moocher.  Whatever you want to call it, you have a team member who just doesn’t do her share of the work, or perhaps worse, does the work so sloppily that it’s no good to anyone.

The question is, whose problem is it?

Secretly, we all want this to be a “manager” problem.  That way, we avoid confrontation, but in return, we gain frustration, anger, and irritation.  I include myself in this category.  I’ve been known to rant at the dinner table, where I can safely vent to my family outside the realm of the office.  My mother is the type of person who works double duty and reasons, “That’s just the way she is.”  My best friend likes to make sarcastic jokes about the person that have nothing to do with the issue at hand.  And I’ve had co-workers who form silent coalitions against a single teammate, complaining about the freeloader over lunch.

“I just need to vent,” we reason.  “Then I’ll get on with my day.”

We are lying to ourselves.

Freeloaders are a team problem, and that means all teammates have to take responsibility for their actions.  Complaining, making up for others, or poking fun doesn’t help you and it doesn’t help the freeloader.  What does help is talking to them about the issue, straight to their face.

It’s not the most comfortable situation.  Every time I’ve sat down to talk to a non-contributing team member – whether as a manager or just a fellow teammate – it’s caused me stress.  However, each time the talk has surprised me.  Oftentimes, a supposed “freeloader” needs a little guidance.  It might be her first time at a new task, and she’s just at a loss as to how to accomplish her goals.  Some of them don’t realize their teammates even think they’re freeloading, and just telling them lights a fire under their ass.  I’d talked to people going through miscarriages and family deaths, attributing to their sudden change in behavior.

But no matter what the reason behind the problem, I have always been able to sit down, help the person with a plan of action on how to get back to being a contributing team member, and made my own work situation much less stressful.

Why shouldn’t you confront a freeloader?  The most common reason – “I hate conflict.  I’d rather just avoid it.”

But if a freeloader distracts you from your main work, if you spend a lot of cycles worrying about it, or if it consumes your waking hours, you’re creating conflict.  It’s just conflict for yourself.  And you’re building more conflict the longer you let it go.

-Deborah Fike

Categories: Teamwork

Work Life Balance

Posted by at 5:44 pm

I had the opportunity to write a blog for a great site called Career Life Connection.  The site focuses on helping people who work remotely to be effective.  It also acts as a support network for all professionals looking for the golden chalice that is “Work Life Balance.”  The website’s founder, Leanne Chase, started the site after certain frustrating events surrounding her old job made her realize there has to be a better way to handle people working from home.  Her story is quite inspired.

Feel free to check it out, and let me know if you have other tips for those not working next to you in Cubicle Nation.

-Deborah Fike

Categories: Teamwork

Doers and Thinkers

Posted by at 6:05 pm

Once while doing a student project where we were tasked to write our strategic recommendations for a Caribbean cruise company, I was paired with a student who said, “You can write the actual paper, Deborah.  I am a thinker, not a doer.”

Now, to be fair, if there ever was a guy meant to be a “thinker,” it was probably this student.  He always had prepared, well-thought out comments, he was knowledgeable about many more subjects than I, and he had the voice of a practiced public speaker.  When he talked, you listened.

But this time, I wasn’t buying.

The thing is, smaller projects (like our duo-driven paper) generally don’t have the luxury of specializing in “doing” and “thinking.”  You have to come up with a plan and get things done with very few team members, and everyone has to pull their weight.  This is the very definition of entrepreneurship, where the manager is also the coder is also the marketer is also the receptionist.  A few people have to do multiple tasks (yes, even ones they are not comfortable with) to get things done.

You might argue that on large scale projects, there are more specialized “thinkers” and “doers.”  While I admit this to be true, I also believe that even specialists have to know a little about the “other” in order to be effective.  A project manager in charge of constructing a building, but has no idea how a building is made, for example, is pretty rare.  He has to have knowledge of the things being done in order to make it work.  And the “doers” can often improve the project by “thinking” and add to the quality of the final project, if they are allowed to do so.

So I challenge all the doers and thinkers out there, to consider the other side.  Doers…have you thought lately about what you do and how to make it better?  And thinkers…when’s the last time you shrugged off your thinking caps and did something?

-Deborah Fike

P.S.  My “thinking” classmate did end up writing part of the paper.  He forgot that as a student, I was supposed to be a “thinker” too, not his note taker.  I reminded him of that…diplomatically, of course.  :)

Categories: Teamwork

Meeting a Schedule vs. Team Member Suggestions

Posted by at 12:12 am

I recently posted a question in the LinkedIn group Project Management Link about how project managers juggle the needs of meeting a schedule versus taking suggestions from team members once the project has started (which could push the project back).  Here are the spectrum of responses:

Leaning Toward Schedule

“Managing projects involves different roles and skills of the project manager. As project manager you have to manage ALL stake holders, including your team AND meeting project objectives such as cost and schedules. One of the most important skills a project manager MUST have, is TEAM-INVOLVEMENT. However to answer your question, I also explain to my team that when the schedule is tight we have to apply the rule “NOT WRONG = GOOD”. So if someone comes up with a brilliant idea, but the schedule is tight and what we have will work, we DO NOT change. Finishing a project on time is important. Brilliant ideas are also important, but we have to try to get those ideas during the scoping phase of the project.” – Victor Hunt, Project Management Consultant

Leaning Toward Team Member Suggestions

“Project time-lines are usually aggressive, but if you don’t build a cohesive group, involve people in decisions, and manage people you are not going to get the support you need when the crunch invariably arrives.  By taking on-board comments/ ideas from your team will allow you to present meaningful ideas and solutions (you cant know everything) when it comes to change-management. With effective communication you CAN change the time line of a project to allow you to effectively deliver.  The biggest sin in PM work is to cut feature on a deliverable in the pursuit of meeting a timeline. I am always happy to dive into this challenge — and if you listen actively to your team you will present this as it happens (ie earlier on in the project) rather than waiting for the “by the way, we cant do x,y,z” as you get into the last 1/3rd of the project.” – Tom Magee, Project Manager

Where do you lie on this spectrum?

-Deborah Fike

P.S.  I found this observation (also from Victor Hunt) very insightful and worth mentioning:  “Be very aware that managing team members is not the same as pleasing all team members. Trying to please all team members can ruin your project.”

Categories: Teamwork