For me these are the people who are most important in the project. Teamwork is always one of my top priorities in teams I manage. I can say I’m rather radical in this area, because it’s very hard for me to accept a primaballerina in the team, although it’s not impossible. It’s even harder when person’s lack of teamwork is followed with wrong attitude. And when I say wrong attitude I mean relatively worse than the rest of the team.
When the company’s culture says that we work from 8 am to 4 pm and generally no one stays longer no matter what’s happening, I don’t expect anyone to be more dedicated. Then, you need Wally to harm the atmosphere in the team. However, it’s easy to find the organization/team/division/company/whatever which works generally with different attitude, trying to get things done first, and look at the clock later. In that case usually it’s enough to have an “8-16” person to ruin the teamwork.
Last example I saw isn’t taken from IT but it’s quite universal. There was a team of three persons – all of them were highly dedicated and that was good because they had a lot of work (I know, I sound like I was telling a parable). Then another person joined. Unfortunately a new guy had different attitude than the rest of the team. He didn’t want to work overtime, was expecting bonus money similar to the others, no matter how big was the difference in their commitment and was complaining all the time.
Maybe any single factor from above list wouldn’t be a great problem, but his attitude as a whole convinced me that it would be an issue there and it would appear soon. The new guy was going to ruin the team attitude unless someone in charge would do something about that. Sure, you can say that his colleagues would continue their job at current level, but it just doesn’t work like that. When the average person sees a colleague sitting next desk who generally don’t give a damn for anything and it’s OK for her bosses, she’ll soon adjust her attitude to what she sees everyday.
After few weeks it appears that I was right and the morale fell flat on the face even sooner than I expected. No one wants to support the black ship with her own work and if she can’t change the black sheep she’ll change herself. Looking from the management perspective there’s a great problem in the team now, because everyone’s waiting for the change. I can imagine at least several different actions from a manager changing the situation in different ways. I’m curious which one will be chosen.
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