If a fellow team member is regularly negative, you can appeal to what Kramer calls “the collective wisdom” of the team by modeling positive behavior and using peer pressure to show the pessimist a more productive way of contributing. This approach can be used when you’re not the team leader as well. Goldsmith suggests that individuals ask themselves before they speak, “Will this comment help our customers? Will this help our company? Will this help the person or team we’re talking about? Will this help the person we’re talking to?” As Goldsmith points out, “Honesty may be the best policy except when it’s destructive and unhelpful.” Once you’ve agreed on norms, ask the team to hold each other to them. According to Kramer, “Sometimes social sanctions work better than leader sanctions.” Set team norms and ask everyone to observe them. Peer pressure is a far more effective tactic. It can be damaging to single out a team member in front of the entire team. Offer your own constructive criticism while providing an alternative solution.ģ. Better yet, you can ask for alternative solutions: “What can we do to make sure the project does make it past Finance?” You can also ask team members to use “but statements.” Ask them to follow skeptical or critical sentences with “but.” For example, your team member could say “This project is never going to make it past Finance, BUT it’s worth laying the groundwork now because next year, Finance is apt to approve more tech projects.” It’s helpful to model this type of behavior for the entire team. For example, if a team member says, “This project is never going to make it past Finance,” ask the speaker to explain why she thinks that. Ask for clarification or more information about what the speaker means. Negativity can fester and eventually kill a team’s momentum and motivation. For example, you can say, “When you make negative comments, the team gets stuck and we aren’t able to move forward.” Kramer points out, “This kind of conversation can be useful from a diagnostic perspective.” Once you understand the underlying reason for the pessimism, you can provide additional support or information if it’s needed.Ģ. The rule when giving this type of feedback, says Jon Katzenbach, author of Wisdom of Teams and founder of the Katzenbach Center at Booz & Co., is to “be at least as positive as you are negative.” Explain why the person is valued on the team and make clear the impact of his behavior. This is best done by pulling the team member aside and explaining how his comments are received.
Here are three approaches to managing negative behavior:ġ. Changing behavior is much easier than trying to reform a person’s long-held beliefs and values. Whatever the source of the pessimism, the key to responding constructively is to focus on the impact of the individual’s behavior, according to Marshall Goldsmith, executive educator and the author of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Some common sources of pessimism include resentment at not having been promoted, a need for attention, or a need to cover for a lack of knowledge or skill. “Some people are dispositional pessimists whose knee-jerk reaction is to see the negative in everything, while others may be expressing a pessimistic point of view based upon informed logic,” Kramer says. Kimball Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, says that it is the role of the leader to understand the underlying cause of the pessimism before acting. The first step is to figure out what is causing your team member’s negativity. Good news: by being proactive you can help the pessimist change his behavior and enable your team to achieve greater productivity. Attempts to ignore or counter frequent negative comments may simply incite further negativity.
Dealing with a pessimist on your team can be a frustrating and time-consuming experience.
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