Incompetence can torpedo your team. What are you going to do about it?

The year 2018 is over (thank goodness) and we have a chance for a fresh start. For many of us that means time for personal stocktaking. What did you accomplish last year? What did you learn? How can you apply those hard-won lessons to the coming year? Should you keep striving to outdo yourself, or should you settle for what you’ve got and ease into the comfort of routine?

Rifling through the mental files in my “2018 evaluations” folder, I’ve come up with a few of my own lessons. The one I’ll share today is this: One thing you can count on is that you can’t always count on people.  And you need to prepare for that.

As I’ve observed in an earlier post, we live in a world where professional failure is more common than conventional wisdom would allow. Failure is also less interesting than is portrayed by the media and in the self-help industry. It can become a serious headache, however, when it is your fellow team member who is doing the failing. I can use myself as a prime example: I don’t always live up to my own professional expectations. It won’t come as a shock to readers that people are not always up to the task. The question is, how do you handle it?

First, let’s get a few obvious things out of the way. Humans are complex, multi-faceted and, not infrequently, multi-talented. This is a marvelous thing, accounting for some truly astounding cultural, engineering, and intellectual feats that have enriched life on this planet. Indeed, in many professions, it is assumed that employees bring multiple talents to the table. We are not like robots, programmed to do only one or two tasks at a time. This truism applies very much to the evaluation field, where evaluators are called upon to deploy a range of both soft and hard skills.

The fun starts when you suddenly discover that key talents are missing from a team member. While it is rare that a new team member is brilliant across the board, most bring at least basic levels of competence to the table. Most score at least a seven on a 10-point scale across the range of necessary competencies. But every now and then, someone doesn’t. They’re a “one” or a “two” in some important area. That’s the thing with being human. We may be multi-talented, or at least multi-capable, but we also come with built-in limitations, which sometimes leads to a giant team-implosion. Oops!

What competencies are we talking about? I would offer that, in the evaluation field, you must be able to:

1. communicate comfortably with others;
2. put together words, sentences and paragraphs in a clear and logical manner;
3. analyze the information you have collected;
4. collaborate with others like a mature and responsible adult;
5. be pleasant and respectful;
6. do what you say you will do; and
7. manage your time and priorities.

On top of these soft, but necessary skills, you may also be expected to be equipped with technical skills and experience in:

1. the sector being evaluated, i.e. agriculture, education, environment, gender, etc.;
2. qualitative or quantitative evaluation methods; and, if applicable;
3. effectively leading a team.

Nothing listed above is rocket science, that particular field generally not falling within the scope of international development projects. You still find yourself surprised, however, when a fellow team member is — how to put this delicately? — totally incompetent.

Of course, the safest solution is to only work with people you have worked with before, and whom you can count on. For individual consultants, however, that is a luxury. Instead, what is more typical is that you join a new team on almost every new assignment. Every year, for example, I end up working on maybe half a dozen different teams, the majority of which are composed of folks I have never laid eyes on. On the one hand, it’s a great way to meet people, make new friends, and learn from your peers. On the other hand, you can end up in some frustrating and stressful scenarios.

I’ve had experiences where it soon became obvious that a team member had pretty serious deficiencies in the interpersonal skills department. For example, Team leader Mr. A, a very plausible stand-in for Ricky Gervais in the TV comedy series The Office, would spend the first 10 minutes of a meeting boasting about his own experience and often end the meeting by insulting the people on the other side of the table. Other times you get a bad case of weak ethics and poor writing skills, as with Dr. B, a native English speaker, who couldn’t write proper English despite her academic pedigree. When I came across passages that were surprisingly well-written, a quick check on Google revealed she had been happily plagiarizing them. (Always good to find out that kind of thing sooner rather than later.) Or someone might impress you in person, but not on paper. Local team member Ms. C knew the sector and country very well and asked the right questions during stakeholder interviews, but couldn’t string two sentences together in a logical way in a report. These were all setbacks which it fell to me to remedy, through many hours — and sometimes days — of extra work.

I have to admit that I only had the pleasure of working with one of these people in 2018; I’d worked with the others before that. But it was last year that it finally hit home: I needed a coping strategy for the next time this happened.

So, what to do on occasions when capabilities are missing? For starters, if the shortcomings are yours, it’s a good idea to reflect and take concrete actions to perform better. If the shortcomings belong to others, cursing under your breath or venting to your significant other can have a wonderfully calming effect, but may not be enough to rectify the situation. Is it possible to overcome such defects through mentoring or teaching? Unfortunately, I have found that it is totally unrealistic to attempt to build the capacity of someone (even if you are in a position to do so), over the course of a single assignment. In any case, you’d first need to spell out their failings to them. That could be pretty awkward, right? Furthermore, you don’t really have much time for capacity building — you need to get the bloody job done.

What you need is a back-up plan, especially if you are ultimately responsible for the work (if you’re the team leader) or because you were asked to pick up the slack (by the team leader). Here are three suggestions:

1. Build in a time buffer: Provide enough slack in your schedule to take into account the extra time that you might need to address the shortfall. For example, if you think a task will take two weeks, try to allocate three weeks.
2. Build in a human resource buffer. Identify persons, either on the team or not, who could step into the breach. Maybe the organization that put the team together (if you are subcontracted) has the resources to bring on extra help.
3. Build in a mental buffer: Prepare yourself not be surprised or upset when colleague X lets you down. Unless you’ve worked with them before, and therefore know their strengths and weaknesses, assume that people have a least one weakness, and that it will impact the work at hand.  

In a word, contingencies!

Let 2019 be a year of contingency planning. The plan comes with its own reward:  if you have a decent contingency plan, you will end up with more time, energy, and even inspiration, to focus on the interesting and fun stuff.