"Cut them loose"
Summary: People are the most important asset of any project, team, or company. Good people working together, sharing a common vision and motivated to achieve common goals, will bring success to any venture.
People are the most important asset of any project, team, or company. Good people working together, sharing a common vision and motivated to achieve common goals, will bring success to any venture. Conversely, the presence of conflicting personal goals and agendas contributes significantly to many IT failures.
Failures can arise when team members emphasize personal agendas with higher priority than shared project goals. In starker terms, when personal goals and ambitions undermine or damage a project, there's a big problem. When senior managers engage in this behavior, the situation becomes intolerable.
Eric Benhamou, networking industry pioneer, describes how he responded to undermining executives while CEO at 3Com. From an excellent interview conducted by Sramana Mitra (emphasis below was added):
The two founders of Palm, Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinski, were in my office explaining to me why I really should not buy Palm and that I should just spin it out. They preferred to be autonomous.
They decided to part ways; it was an abrupt separation. At the time I felt good about it because I did not think that they were going to be serious players inside the company, they would only help themselves but not me. Usually when you go through a fickle situation, you have to find out who is on the boat with you rowing, and they were not rowing on my account.
What a great description of the problem and solution. No matter how valuable someone might be, regardless of their great talent and vision, if they undermine your project, cut them loose.
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Talkback
Undermine your project?
So what
This is a judgment call, of course, but my personal tolerance for sabotage is low.
Where do they go?
This is a major issue in a matrix organization.
Who cares where they go?
Who cares where they go? People on my team who undermine and sabotage the project are history. Where they go is their problem.
The company paying them
"Huh?" you may say. Terminating an employee is hard. You need to document why. You need to give them a chance to change. This isn't a matter of "right" or "fair." It's a matter of avoiding lawsuits.
Ok, so you say that's not the point. The point is people who undermine the project. How do you define that? What if really you are clueless and the person undermining the project is the only one knowledgeable or brave enough to attempt to bring sanity to it?
Let's look at your quote from the interview:
"They decided to part ways; it was an abrupt separation. At the time I felt good about it because I did not think that they were going to be serious players inside the company, they would only help themselves but not me. Usually when you go through a fickle situation, you have to find out who is on the boat with you rowing, and they were not rowing on my account."
Notice the use of words such as "me" and "my." This is a sign of strong personal identification with the project/company, so strong that the personal identification transcends the team/project/company. People like this define "undermining the project" as "not yielding to my authority."
Such project managers burn millions of dollars to accomplish nothing - sometimes even to do harm beyond vaporzing cash - and are far more common than individuals who genuinely attempt to undermine efforts.
I don't buy that
While I certainly understand your point, when I come across the really bad ones, the people who actively do things to undermine the project goals, I find a way to cut them loose from the project. Sure, let them go to another project or department, but get them away from me.
Regarding your point about who defines what is "right", it's definitely a judgment call. If the project manager is experienced enough, he or she should be able to make that call in an objective, thoughtful manner. If the project manager doesn't have the experience to make the call, then I'd recommend they seek assistance. In that case, they probably have more problems than one rogue team member.
What makes a "rogue?" (NT)
Iin this context..
Similar to my definition, but not the same...
Playing out their own agenda with higher priority than the shared goals, to the detriment of the business.
You could argue that it's the job of executives or middle management to make sure projects are aligned with the business, and the job of project managers to ensure team members are aligned with projects.
Upward communications are, by neccessity, at relatively high levels of detail. The problem is the fissures between business objectives and project objectives typically become apparent at the lower levels of the project. The project manager often sees the publication of these fissures as a direct threat to his ability to execute his project, especially in environments where funding is incrementally released or otherwise closely watched.
It's extremely common for the project manager to have strong disagreements with team members about what constitutes an important enough fissure to communicate upwards, especially when those fissures indicate that a project should be killed or substantially altered in scope instead of simply rebaselined.
In these situations, "doing what's right" for the team members often involves effectively sabotaging the project by making issues known to project sponsors.
To make matters worse, project managers often have their own agendas as well. For example, project managers are often measured based on the size of projects they have managed. Consequently, suggestions to "do a pilot" or "build a prototype" for risky systems instead of simply deploying or building them threaten to change a project from something big to something small - from a resume builder to an embarassment.
bad phrase
Find and keep the good ones
I'd rather state: "Find and keep good people" or "Make them row with you".
Nice theory
Good question
However, I believe most of the people is not so negative, just not motivated in the right direction. :)
But, as always, I can be plain wrong...
I don't think money works