Managing Lazy

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Communications Management  

I received an e-mail the other day from someone who was facing a difficult situation and wanted some help. They had taken over a project with a very established team all of whom had lengthy tenure in the organization. While most of the people on the project were motivated and engaged, there were one or two people who just weren’t interested in making any effort to help the project succeed. The project manager that contacted me was looking for some ideas on how to try and get the most out of them without making them feel as though they were being picked on. This new PM didn’t want to try and remove them from the project because they felt that would be giving up too quickly.

In one variation or another, this is probably a fairly common theme, so it seems like something worthy of an article. Of course the easy answer is always to say that the staff should be replaced, but that’s not always possible. In addition, that should always be a last resort. I see removing someone from a team as an admission of failure on my part--I haven’t been able to manage that individual successfully. Being able to turn the behavior around might be harder, but it is also much more satisfying--and most importantly, it is better for the individual involved.

Understand the underlying issue
Before we can start managing the situation, we need to understand what is really…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.