That font!
Not comic sans at least.
How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining?
11–20 of 69 posts
Re: How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining?
#12Sketchnote Bold is the new Comic Sans!
(Not complaining, just observing. I shipped a top selling title that used Comic Sans exclusively!)
Re: How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining?
#13[flagged]
This is true in some cases…but there are other people who just complain because they want attention.
Good managers listen and try to understand the difference between a person complaining because they’re closer to the problem and a person complaining because they are the problem.
Re: How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining?
#14That font!
That enormous sticky header!
Re: How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining?
#15Unproductive complaints are... frustrating if you're on the receiving end of them, because they are basically (and unproductively) asking for help / solutions. But if it's just complaints, they also have the impression that the problem is not in their "sphere of influence"; coffee, for example, is usually handled by a facilities department. It's easy to complain about coffee to your boss, but it's confrontational if you actually pull the issue into your sphere of influence and go to the facilities department to complain.
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.
Re: How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining?
#16[flagged]
I'm not a manager and have no aspirations at all to be one, but I have worked with plenty of "complainers".
Usually what complainers complain about has nothing to do with why they are unhappy. Way too often frustration with people is pointed at circumstance rather than trying to productively sort out the conflicts between the individuals.
And here is where management usually fails. A person complains about unrealistic time plans or how crappy a product will be, so management jumps into action and invent over elaborate processes around securing deadlines and quality, rather than splitting up the dysfunctional team that can't / refuses to cooperate and therefore is always late and produces sub-par quality. And the team will still be late and produce bad quality, and the complainers will still complain.
Re: How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining?
#17> Example: A team member repeatedly complains about timelines. Each time, the manager extends them. Soon, complaining becomes the default negotiation strategy.
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.)
Re: How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining?
#18[flagged]
This is typically what I see. There ARE chronically negative people, but more often “complainers” are the smart people who don’t rely on passive voice and jargon to get ahead or, having been ignored for years by the passive voice jargon cheerleaders while their concerns came true, are bitter and punching the clock.
Re: How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining?
#19[flagged]
This is true in some cases…but there are other people who just complain because they want attention. Good managers listen and try to understand the difference between a person complaining because they’re closer to the problem and a person complaining because they are the problem.
Also individual contributors often fail to grasp the big picture, what seems like an insurmountable issue to them is irrelevant or not a priority in the grand scheme of things. Or it's a pain point for them - but dealing with it will hurt the project overall. Can't even count the number of development/design/product bike shedding discussions, wasted effort on covering edge cases, etc. on features/products that get scrapped once they get tested by users.
This is why I hate managing people - I hate having to deal with all the egos and trying to empathize with everyone to try to get a sense of where they are coming from just to judge what's important or not, and weighing political impact of different calls. Code is simple by comparison.
Re: How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining?
#20Depends on what they are complaining about and how they are doing it. In general, I would ask them how they would fix the problems they're complaining about. The first two steps to fixing any problem are to identify any analyze it. This might be their (unideal) way of doing that.
I had worked with a guy which is smart, or at least persuasive, since him was hired somehow. He after started working with the team, him complaining about the project proposal, about the bad code decisions and had serious discussions with the product owner. After I talked with the PO, I opened a meeting with the complainer to extend my hand and say that I was opened to listen, him thanks me but preferred to stay a little away. The CTO proposed that since him spotted a bad code (it really was), him had time to analyze better and fix! In the end him lost 2 or 3 weeks fixing the code, wasn't able to finish and request resignation directly to the HR with the reason that the team and the project was bad, probably criticized the CTO. I had to take the code him left and finish the fix!