Aligning the Difficult Team Member

The Team Leader as an Effective Coach

May 5, 2009 Christine Carroll

Some individuals possess unique talents yet are lacking interpersonal skills. How do you address an individual who seems oblivious to his misalignment within a team?

One role of a team leader is to facilitate better alignment of individuals with team goals. The seemingly egocentric individual poses a unique challenge. How does one reach this individual?

Your Role in Managing a Team

One way is to better understand the intrinsic motivation for this person. Another way to describe intrinsic motivation is drive. Illustrating the potential alignment between the individual’s drive and a team goal can open the lines of communication.

How can you assess individual drive or intrinsic motivation? One formal assessment tool is the Meyers Briggs personality test. The results indicate a person’s preferences when making decisions, gathering data and ordering his life. The assessment measures the following preferences: introversion-extroversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling, and perceiving-judging.

Use Coaching Technique: Reframing

Managers also may employ a technique of directive coaching called reframing, which is described in Adaptive Coaching by Terry R. Bacon and Karen I. Spear [Davis-Black Publishing 2003]. The authors note that reframing is “using language that is different from your clients’ to create a different picture for them.”

Here is the scenario. An employee perceives that no one disagreed with his ideas on a project. Begin by asking a series of questions that encourage the employee to reflect.

To your employee: Describe Jennifer when she gives feedback at meetings.

  • What was her input during the recent meeting about the new project?
  • What differing approaches did other members of the team present?
  • At what point in the meeting did you observe a shift in the conversation from many ideas and approaches toward one approach?

It is very possible that these process-driven questions will yield more outcome-focused replies from the employee-type described as singularly focused or egocentric.

Employee: We all agreed from the beginning. Jennifer likes the idea too.

As a manager who attended the same meeting, this is the time to present more concrete observations.

Manager:

  • Jennifer addresses her comments to Bob, especially when giving direct feedback about how to approach a project.
  • I recall her doing this mid-meeting and that Bob and Aaron added a couple suggestions.
  • It appeared the three of them then began to move forward and discuss how to meet the project’s timeline.
  • Would you be willing to go check out with Bob his impression of what was agreed to at the meeting?

This approach is direct while leaving room for the employee to reflect and realign him or herself with the other members of the team. You are posing an alternative reality to the employee in a manner that is clear and as palatable as possible.

Ideally, you will be able to present to the employee some overlapping area of agreement related to completing the project. This ties back into the suggestion of appealing to the employees intrinsic motivation. By developing your own skills in observing and reframing, you will be better prepared for this and other employee scenarios.

The copyright of the article Aligning the Difficult Team Member in Training/Professional Development is owned by Christine Carroll. Permission to republish Aligning the Difficult Team Member in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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