How to deal with Lazybones in a team?

"Guide" as long as there is a lazy or a nuisance in a team, the performance of the team will decrease by 30% to 40%. In a team, no matter how good the other staff, as long as there are a few annoying, lazy or incompetent, they can destroy the team and the entire company performance.

The superstars of the staff are very attractive to the boss, but the black sheep may get more attention.

These "bad apples" are upsetting and dragging everyone down, and their destructive actions--anger, laziness and incompetence--are quite contagious. Those who bring in some bad apples in exchange for the benefits of the cure, or who drift towards the rude and incompetent employees, are actually paving the way for the most powerful staff to fail.

It's important for leaders to get rid of bad apples before hiring. If these people are lucky enough to pass the screening, the boss must try to change them or, if necessary, dismiss them.

Emotional contagion

It's not hard to understand why bosses are trying to attract and nurture superstars. The accumulation of mountain research shows that star employees and talented employees can bring amazing achievements to the company. In addition, it is clear that focusing on the best performers and active employees will also make the bosses feel more cheerful.

Serge Bloch

But studies on issues ranging from relationships to office communication suggest that negative interactions in interpersonal interactions can accumulate greater energy than positive interactions. The reason is simple, as psychologist Roy Baumester Roy Baumeister and his colleagues conclude that "bad is stronger than good." These bad apples lead to negative thoughts, emotions and performance from colleagues, much more than the positive response of active employees in their colleagues.

Look at Will Philps ('ll felps), Terence. R. Mitchell (Terence R. Mitchell) and Eliza Bai (Eliza Byington) Study of the relationship between bad Apple and team efficiency. They examined the impact of bad apples on the whole team. These bad apples include lazy people (those unwilling to make efforts), despaired (who show pessimism, anxiety, insecurity and irritation) and nasty people (people who violate the norms of interpersonal relationships). An experiment by Phelps found that as long as a team had a lazybones or a nuisance, the team's performance decreased by 30% to 40%.

What can companies do to eliminate these negative effects? Obviously, the easiest way to do this is to never put a bad apple in the first place. This means that a different approach is needed to evaluate candidates.

Often the screening method is not enough to judge whether a candidate is a bad apple. Job candidates may have been in the best schools, or have been charismatic and talented in previous interviews, thus hiding their laziness, incompetence, or hateful place.

Therefore, one of the best ways to screen employees is to observe the real state of their work under realistic conditions. Akshai Kottari (Akshay Kothari) and Anchit Gupta (Ankit Gupta) are very much in favour of this approach. Their company, Pulse, is located in Palo, Calif. (Palo Alto), to develop news-reading applications for mobile devices. When the pulse company hires new employees, they consider the evaluations of colleagues and supervisors who have worked with them and conduct multiple rounds of interviews. But they say the most effective way is to get candidates to work in the company for a couple of years and get them to do some short-term work (these are paid jobs and the company pays them).

Not only do they learn a lot about candidates ' expertise, Kothari and Gupta say, but they can also see how their personalities--how they respond to setbacks do they know when to ask for help, and when to assist others? is the candidate the type of person the company's employees are willing to work with? They say that There have been a few candidates who look very good on their resumes and have been highly recommended by colleagues and supervisors in the past, but they have not been able to get a job at the end of the process because of the exposure of their professional skills and interpersonal weaknesses during the selection.

Out

It is more important than using some ingenious screening methods to create a corporate culture that does not tolerate bad employees at work. The best companies will express their intolerance towards the bad apple directly. They will explain in advance which actions are unacceptable in the workplace, and then do prohibit in practice and prevent such things from happening at the same time.

Look at Robert Bell's Company (Robert W. Baird &co.) . The financial services company is hailed as a good employer. The company is seriously creating a culture that rejects rudeness and selfishness in work. They call this the "no-jerk rule" (though, in fact, they use a more glamorous word than "bastard").

Paul Purcell, the company's chief executive, said the company would begin to deliver information during the recruitment process. "In the interview, I will look at the applicant's eyes and tell them: ' If I find out you're an asshoie, I'll fire you," he said. ' Most candidates won't be worried about this, but sometimes someone hears it and then turns out to be pale, and then we never see them again. They found some reason to quit the filtering process. ”

When there is a hiring error that really brings a bad apple that is constantly belittling colleagues or always putting his own interests above others, the company will quickly handle or dismiss the employee.

The short temper of Purcell does not apply to the culture of every company. If you're looking for a more circuitous approach, look at how famous chef Alice Watters (Alice Waters) does it. Walters has been in charge of the Panis restaurant (Chez Panisse) in Berkeley, California (Berkeley) for 40 years.

The biographer Thomas Mack Nano (Thomas McNamee) describes how Waters's love for people and dishes infects people around her. Over the years, though many of the black sheep had been swept out of the door, Waters did not keep it wide open. The steps to dismiss an employee are usually begun by a colleague from Waters who tactfully conveys the "not very happy" information that waters now has. If this hint does not work, then the colleague from waters, or another person near Mr. Waters, will dismiss the employee.

A spokeswoman for the Panis restaurant said that Waters did sometimes personally dismiss employees, and that "she would make those employees feel as if they were making a decision to leave, and it seemed to them that it would be better for them to continue looking for new job opportunities". The spokesman also said that the restaurant's existing staff, serving the restaurant for dozens of years, accounted for a large proportion of the people.

Closed quarantine

Of course, there's always a time when a company can't (or won't) fire a disruptive employee. For example, perhaps this employee is a black sheep but also a star, or this person in other aspects of the company's operations is important. In such cases, leaders may try to take disciplinary, warning and incentive measures to limit the behavior of "poisoned" employees. Another tactic is to separate bad apples from other employees in space.

In a company, there is a skilled but disgusting engineer. The company's leader couldn't convince himself to dismiss him, so he rented a nice office for him in a few blocks from the staff building. His colleagues are happy, and so does he--because he likes to be a loner.

But one caveat: those who believe that some destructive superstars are "too important" to the company to dismiss their leaders tend to underestimate the potential losses they may cause. The case of a clothing retail store cited by Stanford University (Stanford University) researcher Charles Orailly (Charles O ' Reilly) and Jeffrey Filford (Jeffrey Pfeffer) is instructive. The company sacked a salesman who had the best performance but was also a bad apple. After his departure, although none of his former colleagues had been able to catch up with his personal sales, total sales surged nearly 30%. Two researchers say the lesson tells us: "One person drags all the people, and once he leaves, the others can do their best." ”

Robert Satton (Robert Sutton) is a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University. He is a good boss, a bad boss: the subordinates do not say but you do not understand the management of the Secret "(bad boss:how to be the" Best...and Learn from the worst.) The author of a book. )