Dealing with difficult personalities, uncertainty and literalism.

Dealing with difficult personalities is a fundamental truism for management. One of the good things about projects is that they last a finite time and team members change often. Because of this dynamic environment, most project managers just rely on the inevitable personal change. This is being lazy, and I can assure you that I relied on this lazy technique from time to time. But good management is dealing with the present time reality.

This is the first of a series of postings on dealing with difficult personalities. In this post we will deal with literalists. In future posts we will discuss other types of annoyances.

Let me start with a caveat. There are no bad people just bad managers. Using your human capital to its best project advantage is a great skill. What kind of person am I? Why was I effective as a project manager and business executive? Why did my success confound certain individuals who worked for me?

I am by nature (most good folks are) kind of introspective. Not that I spend time inspecting my belly button lint, but I do spend time trying to puzzle out why some folks are more successful at work than others even when intellectually they seem to be more or less equally gifted.

These are my personal observations, they do not reflect any formal psychological or sociological studies, research or findings. What makes us unique also makes us interesting to work with.

Here are some observations and suggestions.

• Literalists are those who read every direction, correspondence, direction etc from a pure literal view. They seldom look at the context or the importance of the matter, but focus on its correctness and internal consistency. Literalists do not like internal contradiction even when the area is minor or insignificant. Uncontrolled a literalist can bombard managers with clarification requests, observations of “mistakes”, and seldom complete tasks on time. As life and work are, more often than not, messy and inconsistent, how does one deal with literalists.

Literalists get upset (and sometimes angry and combative) when their supervisors are not able to provide a consistent information environment, or worse when the manager providescontradictory or inconsistent directions. Among others, these inconsistencies can come from the clients, government regulations, incomplete scope documents, or conflicting market signals.

How does a manager deal with individuals who have problems dealing with inconsistent information?

My recommendation:

Eliminate fear as a motivator or demotivator on your project.

Create a place where honest mistakes, based on judgment are not punished, just acknowledged and repaired.

Make sure that your team members know that the outcome of the project is more important than perfection.

Keep a culture of open communication, one that embraces ambiguity as a reality of the work place.

When faced with continued questions from a literalist, never give them an answer, ask them a question., such as: What do you think? What would you do? Did you check with the source author? Be supportive of the answers, offer other options for decision making.

When your team members know that making decisions based on sound judgment is encouraged and rewarded more than asking questions are, they will make decisions. If the environment of the project encourages decision making, make sure you team members feel comfortable to report their decisions. Never react negatively to a decision made by your team. Engage in positive communication.

If a mistake, due to inconsistent or ambiguous information was made, I would apologized to team members for not providing good information, clear up the information inconsistency and add what additional information is now available. Ask the team what they would do differently now.

If you have a literalist on your team, make sure you constantly reassure them that you know that the world is ambiguous and that their need for consistency is a good thing, not a character flaw. Encourage them to make decisions, record the ambiguity and report it. Ask them not to stop what they are doing, but go forward with what they think is right. Reward them, never punish them.