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How do you handle a negatively disruptive/unethical team member who is also a star performer with a virtually irreplaceable and critical skill-set?

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Karthik Ramamurthy Author, Say YES to Project Success| Founder KeyResultz Chennai, Tamilnadu, Tamilnadu, India
Gerald is a star project performer, with a unique and very rare skill-set critical to your project. He comes up with brilliant ideas and is extremely productive.
A dream project contributor, right? Not entirely.
Gerald is terribly arrogant, publicly humiliates other team members, and constantly causes conflicts by spreading baseless rumours.
Worse, he was recently proven to claim credit for another team member's work, and in the past, pilfering.
As Project Manager and therefore leader, this seems to be a "lose-lose" situation:
a. Keep Gerald in the team, and team morale suffers, bringing down overall productivity.
b. Releasing him will create a situation where critical tasks will be delayed, therefore endangering the project.
Have you been in a similar situation? Is there a "win-win" way?
Please share your valuable views for the benefit of our PM community.
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Adrian Carlogea Australia
In my opinion this has nothing to do with Project Management but to Human Resource management.

Permanent employees are not hired to work on a project they are hired to work in the organization and working on a project is just a temporary work assignment.

Most PMs are not managers at the organization level and as such they have neither the authority nor the duties to deal with this kind of issues. However if a situation like this can put the project in danger they have to raise it as a risk and/or escalate the issue to management and especially to the functional manager.

The decision on whether is it worth keeping someone like Gerald in the organization should be taken by the functional manager as he can negatively affect the organization as a whole and not just a project.

However if management decides that the positives Gerald brings to the organization outweigh the negatives then Gerald would be kept and he would bring a lot of benefits to the organization. In this case PMs and other employees that have to work with him must adapt or loose their jobs.

Like it or not when someone is very good and brings a lot of value he can get away with many things and he/she is treated differently than less performing individuals.
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Alexandre Costa Scrum Master| Integer Consulting - Pictet technologies Loures, Portugal
I don't believe in ireplace members, so if his behavior is prejudicial to the rest of the team , if for some reason after some trys to bring the superstar to reason, endorse all efforts to solve the situation , and was impossible to handle is behavior , sometimes the only alternative is removing the person from project.
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Yousaf Khan PM Consultant| City of Toronto Toronto, Ontario, Canada
This is not an uncommon scenario, especially in technically complex projects where a few resources have critical knowledge. You could:

1. Review the work planned for Gerald and plan for replacement as early as possible.
2. Discuss your plan with the functional manager and HR.
3. Reprioritize work so work may be independently delivered by other team members where possible and move Gerald's tasks forward.

It may help to reduce the impact to the project delivery.
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1 reply by Adrian Carlogea
Sep 21, 2019 4:26 AM
Adrian Carlogea
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That's easier said than done. Someone with rare skills is very hard to replace. As a PM if you try to replace someone with rare skills you may end being replaced by management.

As I said this is a human resource issue. Management and not PMs has to decide if someone like Gerald is worth keeping.
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Adrian Carlogea Australia
Sep 20, 2019 11:36 AM
Replying to Yousaf Khan
...
This is not an uncommon scenario, especially in technically complex projects where a few resources have critical knowledge. You could:

1. Review the work planned for Gerald and plan for replacement as early as possible.
2. Discuss your plan with the functional manager and HR.
3. Reprioritize work so work may be independently delivered by other team members where possible and move Gerald's tasks forward.

It may help to reduce the impact to the project delivery.
That's easier said than done. Someone with rare skills is very hard to replace. As a PM if you try to replace someone with rare skills you may end being replaced by management.

As I said this is a human resource issue. Management and not PMs has to decide if someone like Gerald is worth keeping.
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Josh Nicholson Customer Success Manager | Project Management Tools| nTask Ca, United States
Discuss it with that team member that how his or her behavior is affecting the work environment and become a blocker in business goals achievement. If that team member does not oblige then one should have to let them go. Because ethics should be more important.
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James Shields IS Director - Portfolio Solutions| City and County of San Francisco, SFPD San Francisco, Ca, United States
Karthik -

There is an on-demand Webinar, "Control Freaks, Queen Bees and Workplace Saboteurs: Preventing, Managing and Eliminating your Project Nightmare" by Paul Pelletier that covers the very issue that you are experiencing. It's worth a listen.
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