How to be a poor contributor

by James Costello

There are lots of ways to be a good contributor to a project, but there are also a lot of ways to be a poor contributor. I’ve been involved with a few of these of late, and am guilty of some and frustrated by others.

My examples:
1. Don’t respond to someone until they have sent the third e-mail on the same topic.
2. Tell someone you will “get to it”.
3. Be consistently late for everything – deadlines, meetings, work.
4. Attempt to control situations through your lateness to give yourself more prominence.
5. Accept more responsibility than you are really willing to accept.

You, dear reader, may also frequently interact with people like this in your business day and as a result experience frustration, delays, and lowered monetary returns (especially business owners and mangers). So what can we do when we encounter these poor contributors or, worse yet, realize that we are being poor contributors? How do we deal with the defense that they were unaware that what they were doing was causing problems for other people?

First, we need to resist the urge to take this person (or ourselves) out back and provide some attitude adjustment to get them back on track. Second, we need to adjust our approach for dealing with them (or again, ourselves).

Here are five suggestions for improving your interactions with the “poor contributor”:

1. Provide more information/seek more information about the situation.

There are few people who want to appear to be the bad guy (professional wrestlers and Alan Rickman aside), but if  they’re shown that they are negatively impacting those around them, they then have the opportunity to change their behavior. This is not an intervention or a confrontation; it’s more of a passing-along of an observation. “John, I am not sure you are aware, but the way that you are handling this is causing other people to fall behind in their work.”

If you recognize that you are the poor contributor, acknowledge what has been going on and ask for ways to improve the situation. “Dave, I know my handling of the situation has not been the best, is there anything I can do to get the project back on schedule?”

2. Create a plan of action going forward.

Deadlines might not have been a sufficient motivator for the poor contributor. It might be necessary to create a series of consequences for continued behavior. It will be necessary to follow through on these.

If you are the contributor who is getting the opportunity to improve, more direct communication is going to be needed with the people around you. You will need to provide updates, you will need to have project plans, you will need to have follow through.

3. Focus on the organization, not the individual
Are they/you a good fit for the organization for the role they are in right now?
Can they see the larger picture beyond themselves?
Can they see the needs of the organization in relation to themselves?
Staying may be more difficult for all parties in the long run, but it may also be the most profitable for the company

4. Take action.

The plan in part 2 and the organizational focus in part 3 need to be implemented. This is course-changing; it means helping someone move from one way of thinking and acting in a situation, to a new way.

If you are the contributor with the opportunity, this is where your changes get made.

5. Follow through
Help the other contributor to complete more (don’t do it for them).
If you are the contributor, this is the time you get to make up for prior actions. You are no longer saying you will complete something, you are completing it. This is also a great time to figure out what tasks you never want to do again and what tasks you don’t want to do again, but probably will because you are gainfully employed and wish to stay that way.

As I said at the beginning, I’ve been dealing with a few contributors in need of improvement recently and have learned lessons about dealing with others and how I can improve myself. The biggest of these lessons is that being a poor contributor is not a career killer; staying one is.