How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining?
andiroberts.com
andiroberts.com
A good way to partition the complainers into serious and unserious groups is to ask for a written plan. Unserious complainers backoff quickly, while serious complainers will be glad someone is taking their suggestion seriously.
If it is really a good idea, it will attract the attention of other serious people and become common knowledge in the organization. The shift in common knowledge is the most important change because the problem goes from something that many think they have to live with, to something that has a solution. At that point it becomes something to prioritize against everything else.
This does present some risk to leaders, it's much easier to seem incompetent when there are solutions available that are not being put to use. Leaders need to specifically address why known solutions aren't being implemented yet, and rationalize the decision.
It's a sure was to demotivate a serious complainer. He knows the vote will be turned against him.
The only was to give him confidence is to promise that the plan will be judged objectively, not democratically.
Objectivity in tech is more often than not in the eye of the beholder.
Knowing how to fix the problem shouldn't be a hard prerequisite to raising an issue. I've seen situations where everyone on the team is aware of a problem, but the only people with authority to solve it are sitting around waiting for it to work itself out without their intervention.
Of course the natural thought is "raising an issue constructively isn't complaining", but there's a kind of viewpoint bias on both sides of this. Sometimes people who are too wedded to some idea or way of doing things view any criticism at all in a reflexively negative light, just as some people tend to air grievances as a hobby without a constructive outcome in mind.
Complaint: tickets created by the QA team for developers, even seemingly trivial ones, stagnate in Jira for months and sometimes years without anyone looking.
Written plan: Hire somebody who will be actually responsible for planning and prioritization. Hire more developers, so that the existing ones are not overloaded.
Reality: "This is not a realistic plan. There is a budget, and you are not the one who makes hiring decisions, so shut up and stop creating tickets unless there is something really serious".
So - is the complainer above serious, or not?
(all of the above is pure fiction)
This can be good but I've seen it weaponized before by an incompetent cto to deflect and delay any change. He would ask for written proposals on the most minute details until people just gave up trying to fix anything.
Not everything needs to be done yesterday. I've "executed" plans where leadership basically flips flops on their position. The team started putting all these hare brained ideas behind feature flags.
Wish we had this complaining guy.
I think that successful teams may have a place for a "team canary" (?): someone that is going to speak up about points of friction where most others might just end up with apathy and learn to deal with the inefficiency or friction (a "that's just how it is" attitude). Sometimes, complaints are a sign of genuine friction. Complainer may not feel like they have the authority/allotted bandwidth to remove the point of friction. When this happens, give this person some ownership of the friction points and see what happens.
Better to have a free, easy ability to complain about things, and if there is a good manager hanging around somewhere, they can synthesize the complaints and discover if there are solutions possible at the org level, which individual contributors might not know about or even be functionally able to own.
Often, clients would literally tell us to f*ck off when they realized we would not do anything that wasn’t in the contract verbatim, no matter how trivial.
To me, it was insanity. I would have preferred actually solving customer issues in a partnership fashion, and day-to-day work was nightmarish due to the constant conflict of values. Raising an issue about this got me branded a complainer.
The company slowly gathered enough references to attract some bigger clients (realistically: via backroom deals and kickbacks) and was eventually acquired, and some time later the executives were politely told to pack their things and get out.
They got what they wanted: a hefty paycheck and a load of shares from the acquiring company. The entire company was an acquisition scam from the get-go.
Fascinating examples. I have never in my professional career heard anybody refer to these as "complaining". "Complaints", yes, but in English that has does not have the same connotation.
It opens you up to vulnerability. You speak to people you don't usually speak to; you get confronted with the realities of that particular issue; office coffee for example is often a factor of budget vs cost, long-term supply and support contracts with coffee machine companies, and of course personal taste. Are you going to take on some responsibility for all that?
Of course, the other part is that you get hired for one job, stepping outside of that role to pursue something not directly impacting said job is often frowned upon. I say often because it's a bit of both, the best people will take on more and different things than what they were hired for.
Anyway. Complainers can / should get a training about "circle of influence/control", also because I doubt that work stuff is the only thing going on in their life, it can help them outside of work too. Knowing what you can change and what is outside of your control is great for your peace of mind and general attitude.
Of course chronic complainers complain about stuff out of their control. They've fixed (at least in thier eyes) the items within their control. Asking them "what would they do" is but itself entirely ineffective unless anybody is going to act on it.
Well, are the timelines too short? Is the team member complaining, or are they pointing out actual problems with the proposed timeline? And if the complaining gets the timeline extended to something reasonable, is there a problem with it being a negotiation tactic if it works?
> Learned helplessness: complaint as despair
> Leadership move: Restore agency through small wins.
This feels like when we'd let our five year old pick out what clothes she wanted to wear. Shouldn't the leadership move here be to try to solve the source of the despair?
This article focuses on dealing with the team member, and not the sources of the complaints. Sure, some people are just negative downers. But the first three examples on the page seem like actual external problems that the complainers are noticing and voicing concern about.
(And if you think it's bad to have complainers, wait until the complainers realize that no change is forthcoming, and either stop engaging at all, or go find work somewhere better.)
I assume that it is using a ton of ligatures, because consecutive letters always look different, but is that the only thing going on or is there something even more pernicious happening?
So when a proposal is tabled, they will point out non obvious shortcomings and unintended concequences.
This is not 'complaining'.
Neither does this mean you immediatly have to keel over and ditch the plan. Plenty of times something can succeed against all odds.
But smart management will take into account the information provided, rather tjan labeling it as something to ignore without furter thought.
(Not complaining, just observing. I shipped a top selling title that used Comic Sans exclusively!)
Comic Sans' only sin was being such a good font that it became "too popular".
Really, Helvetica and Times Roman should get at least as much criticism, but they get a pass for being suitably boring.
They left off one critical reason:
The person is a problem solver and is correct
It’s like those people who are racist: they always make me feel better with myself because I don’t hold such beliefs. If everyone would be a saint, I would feel a bit down (because I’m not one).
I have only worked with one person in my life who was really like this though, so maybe you're just lucky and haven't experienced a truly committed negative Nancy.