And guess what? Politicians do this shit to us ALL THE TIME. You badmouth everything to get at the person in power–worst XXXX ever, XXXX crisis, XXXXgate, etc.
I’ve always thought these assholes had a greater effect on whatever XXXX was. Watch for politicians talking down the economy for political reasons. They’re worsening it and screwing us all over just by badmouthing for their own benefit.
(Note there are no D’s or R’s in this comment; if you feel the need to respond please keep it that way)
I was glad to get to the end of the article and read the positive affect of good leadership - the real point to take away from the article. The need for good leadership has been my mantra in software development for over 20 years.
It’s been my experience, that we constantly fight a battle to win over team members to the goal of the team(s). Yes, I’ve had self-motivated team members, and they are like a cool breeze in the early morning sunrise. But I’ve rarely come across bad apples who are bad apples through and through. As the article mentions, we can all fall into one of the bad apple characteristics at one time or another. The team leader needs to become aware of these symptoms (and their affects), develop the ability to detect them early, learn how to deal with them effectively, and stay consistently vigilant with team morale.
While I agree that getting rid of bad apples is possibly the easiest approach, I’d argue that it isn’t necessarily the best leadership approach.
As Dr. John Maxwell says, Leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less.
Winning a bad apple back into the team has far greater positive impact than just removing a thorn in the team’s side.
It’s like questioning are you evil? Every human has possibility under certain circumstances to be evil, I think the same holds true for being a bad apple…
But sure there’s some people who are worse a lot more often…
You should look into reading something about corporate culture. When you come into a new company you should get the company culture to blend in, that’s the point. If everybody are slackers and you are a hig-achiever then you will not blend in, and therefore you’ve become the bad apple.
Personally, I’m getting pretty sick and tired of the whole bad apple theory.
Sure, it’s true, 100% true even, but 90% of the time it’s just used, or rather, abused, as an excuse to blame and consequently get rid of the people that dare to critize the status quo. A disfunctional that doesn’t complain is still a disfunctional team.
I was struck by how similar these Bad Apple strategies are to the 1944 U.S. Office of Strategic Services ‘Simple Sabotage Field Manual’
(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of per sonal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the juris diction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
I agree with mark above: This study, consisting of groups of four college students, isn’t necessarily representative of all people in all environments.
Does this really surprise anyone? You see this almost every day in professional sports. When someone is becoming the bad apple, the team tries to get rid of them. It seems like the teams with the best chemistry and least amount of problems are the ones with the most success.
I was the lead for a team with a bad apple like this. Always complaining that it was too difficult and that no one would ever train him adequately. (Thing is…none of us got training of the type he wanted…we had to go out and find the answers we needed.) His constant bellyaching and griping eventually spread to several members of the team. (I’m obviously not the talented leader described in this article.) When my boss said I had to choose someone to leave our team, I jumped at the chance to get rid of this guy…even though there were less experienced folks on the team. Soon, we were getting more done with less people.
This reminds me of the most recent 60 minutes podcast. In it, they discuss a mortgage salesman at a huge mortgage bank who went to all his superiors and executives trying to inform them about the bad mortgages they were all making.
He was of course fired, as a bad apple, when he threatened to warn Wachovia of the bank’s terrible loans when Wachovia made overtures to acquire the bank.
Of course, after Wachovia acquired the bank for some $23 billion, they ended up losing more than $30 billion, being acquired on a fire sale, and then the resulting bank needed billions of bailout dollars to continue to exist.
So my point is, in certain environments where the team’s approach is so terrible and backwards, you can hardly blame the bad apples for trying. Granted, acting like a bad apple, even in a terrible environment, is never going to fix anything. In that case, your choices are either to run away, or try to fix things in a more subtle way. Both are impossible choices.
And fixing $30 billion in bad loans is probably impossible no matter what you do.
I’ve always assumed this was true. All members of a team, contribute positively and negatively. Strength in either direction carries more influence (not everyone is equal).
More importantly, the contribution of a team, any team, is a combination of their efforts, which means that it is intrinsically a compromise. People have long known that ‘design by committee’ generally produces lackluster designs. The only way around this is to allow one (and only one) visionary to control everything. The big problem of course, is that that amps up the risk considerably as well.
This is a huge problem with many of the newer Software methodologies. They advocate that everyone should have their say, that the design should ‘always’ be from a committee. The results of this approach are well-known.
