In this article we’ll talk about different types of people that, in our experience, have shown to add value in its own niche. They are valuable to every team but hard to put into the same cocktail to make them perform together.
Of course, managing them require leadership skills that are not very common, you must adapt to the interlocutor, being able to have technical, strategic or pure project monitoring conversations, not to mention ego and people skills.
Good players require good coaches to get the most out of them
The “expert”
Deep subject matter experts that amass large chunks of experience and knowledge. They are critical for example to design a transformation since they control the as-is state. They are also good at telling about previous mistakes to avoid them. They usually suffer from ego flaws and are hard to make them part of a transformation since it directly challenges their way of doing things.
Ideas to manage them: understand how lost they already are in their ego, can they really be a part of this team or they are beyond salvation? They can also be placed in “advisory” roles to listen to what they say but reduce any empowerment. They require large amounts of recognition.
The “autist”
Every team needs an autist that doesn’t give up under any circumstance. If managed properly, they can mobilise teams or carry exhausting tasks like those where people need to be told 100 times what to do. They are great at building followership and attracting talent, advance technically complex issues, etc. They usually suffer from having little “political and social intelligence” which makes them a hard peer to work with.
Ideas to manage them are: keep them close to you as they require constant supervision. Put them on the right role for that profile, e.g., lab type work where the process, quality and consistency is important. Empower them when needed but be aware that teams will become exhausted and pissed at them, so break the glass only in case of emergency. If too tiresome downgrade under another manager willing to put in the time to supervise them.
The “hammerhead”
People who enjoy having everything planned and get overly excited at Gantt charts. They like AND CAN micromanage projects that seniors usually dont have time or skills to do. Large teams benefit greatly from them as they help you focus on more critical initiatives. Depending on the organisation, this type of profile also helps build credibility in certain forums e.g., Finance, Control, and buys you time to make the transformation for real.
Ideas to manage them are: lots of empowerment to open the team blackboxes, make facts transparent but they also need to have decent social skills to win that right naturally. Place them in PMO, control, Agile/program office kind of roles. Put some experts beneath them so they also approach the role from a content point of view and not as the Gestapo.
The “highly regarded”
People that don’t need formal empowerment. No matter how good you feel, as we discussed in other posts, there will always be people against change and it’s very important to have someone on the team who has a long history and reputation to put them to rest. When others see him involved in a crazy idea they think “if this guy is on board I should be too”… they are a seal of guarantee. They usually however can become a problem as their reputation can be bigger than your formal role, even if you are their boss.
Ideas to manage them are: assess their true followership since these people are hard to manage because of their seniority and having them challenge your every decision is unfeasible. Aim them to the outside, instead of critisinging your every move on how you do things, have them lead client (internal client) like roles where they can align receivers of what you do. They can also lead control functions, especially those that require complex approals and bureocracy they can navigate. Decent also at interim roles.
The “umbrella”
People that play the first line of defense on the team. Although it depends on the sector, all large organisations have internal processes that can down you with problems. Bureaucratic and tedious processes that can kill the bandwidth of teams like PMOs, audits, risk management or security in the case of more traditional companies. It is important to have a person who knows these processes and can funnel all work through him…they act as an umbrella so the rest of the team is not affected on a day-to-day basis. Ideally, they should also act as a lever of change for these processes, but ensuring that they do not affect their colleagues too much will already be a great achievement.
Ideas to manage them are: similar to the hammerhead, lots of empowerment to align the teams they are actually helping is ideal. They require recognition, especially informal one form everyone as their roles is tedious and frustrating.
There are many other profiles that are more straight forward, like the “follower” who usually are good at executing orders without questioning or the “visualizers” that are amazing at connecting a vague ideas to action through a good team setup, plan, etc. However, there is also…
The “stupids”
Although this is not a profile per se, there are people that doesn’t fit in the previous categories. Their main feature is their inability to do anything, sometimes just complaining about how bad things are. You will find them in your team or as peers and their stupidity needs to be dissipated… just like heat.
The best way? Create a project that apparently sounds relevant, staff them and aim also the burocrats towards it so they have fun together. With this we limit the damage they can cause to the rest of the team. When it is seems their project is not moving, rename it (e.g., something 2.0), launch it and repeat.
The biggest problem is not identifying stupidity but learning what do to with it