When Team Members Don't Pull Their Weight

This is a magazine article I wrote

A leaders’ role in supervision and ensuring that objectives are met is greatly constrained by members who do not pull their weight. Instead of leaving the team’s progress to nature, identification of this lacklustre in team contribution and managing possible lack of contribution are the keys to team success. Team members, especially sub-leaders, may not share similar leadership and project management experiences with the leader and with fellow sub-leaders. The thorns in the flesh are pseudo-leaders who do not pull their weight. These are usually people in leadership positions—based on meritocracy and/or seniority—with questionable leadership skills, and limited helicopter views. Let us examine this lack of contribution at work and how a leader could overcome such problems.

What is a lack of contribution?

A lack in contribution could be viewed from two perspectives.

• From a macro-perspective, judgment is based solely on the end-result of any project. In practical sense, a bad outcome almost always represents a lacklustre in contribution by team members and the leaders, while a favourable outcome says the opposite. Bearing group dynamics in a project team as a whole, when team members do not contribute, the leaders are at fault.
• From a micro-perspective, the team members, including the leaders, dispraise the black sheep. The nuances are usually pegged onto the leaders’ mental models on middle-management. While different leaders deem good middle-management differently, the chief concerns usually revolve around the team members’ ability to effect changes by decentralising work, managing expectations and logically presenting the work done. Unfortunately, in ineffective teams, pseudo-leaders often hide their inabilities long enough to tarnish the collective result.

We shall only discuss the group dynamics within a team, i.e. micro-perspective, here. The nuances of a lack of contribution within a team could manifest themselves in these broad categories.

• No follow-through on plans. Having a plan does not necessarily mean there would be an end-result if team members lack the perseverance or discipline to follow through with it. Many plans had been overtaken by events, digressed in central ideas or are not fully materialised with early set-backs. All tasks have to end justifiably (“justifiably” because in some cases, the interim set-backs forbid a continuation) by a faithful adherence to the discussed plans and solving problems along the way. An example of a non-follow-through would be a manager who suggested a translation review, and after two months, there was no further mention and the review ended inconclusively.
• No enforcement. Not everyone is apt in group dynamics and managing teams. Some sub-leaders lack this experience and fall weak when their sub-team members disagree to a coordinated approach. This weakness forbids the pseudo-leaders to take charge and be in control of their sub-teams’ functions, thus, hampering the entire team’s mission. For example, a business development manager who implemented a Knowledge Management (KM) package for the whole company, but he failed to conduct checks and to remind his colleagues on KM good practices.
• Emotion vs. professionalism. In their purest forms, emotion is for friends and kins, while professionalism reigns at work. Involving too much emotions at work, and hence, causes a work detraction is unprofessional. However, not everyone would agree with this, and a varying degree of emotion would be shown by different team members. For example, if a licensed debt collector chooses not to frequently call on a debtor who is very old and sickly, is he pulling his weight?
• Idea vs. rationale. Some team members love to spew ideas without rationalising them. An idea would only go as far as a plan could be formulated to achieve its stated goal. While a capable leader may achieve the goal, it would not be optimal for him to concentrate on one if his sub-leaders could not feed the mission objectives individually. An example would be an editor, who suggests an industry magazine column, which requires great information-gathering effort by sales personnel, for the director to follow-up.

What should leaders do?

When team members do not pull their weight, the remedy sometimes lies with the leader. Instead of commencing work with just a workplan, leaders should pay similar attention to define members or sub-teams’ jobscope, and consciously address areas where jobscope overlaps. A team could only function smoothly when there are a clear work plan, a conscious designation of responsibilities, and a proper address of conflict areas. The physical means to do these are:

• Conduct a briefing to address the aims, the goals and how to do certain tasks in general. These goals must be quantifiable. Leave the details and the actual execution to the sub-teams or the members
• Address each individual or sub-teams’ jobscope and gel them with the bigger objectives
• Constantly mitigate jobscope overlaps
• Should there be a need to re-align the process amid the project, ensure that everyone within the team knows what would be changed
• Encourage a sharing culture, which obliges everyone to share key tasks and objectives with others

Having done the above, a leader would have clearly communicated obligations to his members. This would also mentally shape the members to fulfill their stated responsibilities – most people do not want to be branded as black sheep.

However, the above would falter if a leader does not follow through and enforce his plans. A leader would have to constantly remind members of the greater objectives while managing problems on group dynamics (read: emotion) or professional matters that may surface from time to time. He would need to be hard at times when certain members show signs of ill-performance, and to manage the progress with quantifiable interim results.

Importantly, a leader should exercise emotional intelligence (EQ) when dealing with individual members. This is more effective when the team is small. A leader should be tactful in approaches and let members feel that the he is helping, not fault-finding. As far as EQ is concerned, bear in mind that dumb is sometimes smart, and being articulate and knowledgeable should be packaged with emotions that allow members to think one is sharing his experiences, and not a mere payment of lip-service.