Leadership with passive subjects
Most leadership advice (that I have read) assumes all the team members are motivated and want to improve themselves. However, what about the opposite? What can happen when a developer is not interested in improve their skills and is dragging down the team?
Along this post we will delve on the subject of what to do when you have to lead over different types of developers.
A note of warning
In Spain, contractors are hired as a temporal replacement for full-time permanent employees. They work in the same office than the company employees but are paid monthly by the contracting company. They have the same responsibilities of the employees but they are paid by the contracting company.
So, the contractors are employees of a contractor company that rents them to other company (client).
This way of working is good for newcomers to the field or people that want to get experience fast. As you will be working for different companies and teams each year or so, you will get a pretty full picture about the tech ecosystem where you are based.
However it also has some detractors as some contactor companies pay low salaries to their employees while they bill the client companies for a much higher amounts. Sometimes they pay 30-40% of the amount they are being paid by the client.
Anyway, this schema is used because in Spain (well in all Europe, actually) it tends to be harder to terminate an employee at-will. We have some (well-deserved) working rights and it is more expensive to end the employer-employee relationship than in other countries (e.g. USA).
Most of the contractors end up being hired by the company if they perform well (and the client company is a renown company), so it is assume that this is a temporal situation.
A tale of two contractors
I am going to present you two real stories about two different contractors and how they reacted to the needs of the company they were working for.
Contractor 1: one of the team
Imagine a contractor that has been offered a fill in a company. They will work for full-weeks in the office of the client, they just behaved like one more of the team. They worked the same hours than us, had a pro-active attitude and was eager to learn.
This imaginary contractor also asks the difficult questions and discuss alternatives with the other developer and engineers.
They end up hired after a year by the client company.
Contractor 2: the “not in my task” guy
Let’s do the same exercise again, but with some differences.
First let’s suppose that they are working in a greenfield project. A project that will imply them researching technologies, authentication schemas, new patterns, etc. This kind of projects are a delight and while it implies a ton of work, they offer skills improvement to the developers.
You work as a team member and you are assigned to work, mentor, guide and help him achieve a successful project. You are excited because you pour yourself into junior people and enjoy helping them improve their career.
However, the relationship is rocky at first and pretty bad after a while. The contractor demands a detailed list of tasks and those tasks need to be created by the manager. The contractor ignores your feedback with a this was not in the task.
As the time progresses, no feedback from the contractor, no pro-activity. They even ask to be micro-managed by the manager.
You feel like a scarecrow.
Suppose they also elevate a complain about receiving negative feedback of their work, and no high-detailed tasks.
They were not hired, nor they will have a good recommendation from any member of the team ever.
What do in case of the contractor 2?
Of course this is an intellectual exercise, but what would you do with an uncooperative contractor? You cannot fire them because you already have a contract. You are not their manager, just an engineer/mentor and are just ignored by them.
If you have tried to fix the relationship, talked about this to your manager, and the contractor just refuse your guidance and feedback… You will need to just ignore them.
No problem is so big or so complicated that it can’t be run from! Linus (from the Peanuts comic strip)
There is no other way of dealing with that. You will end up burned out and you will achieve nothing. There is no way to help a person that wants no help from you. It looks like nonsense to reject up-skilling and improving your career prospects, but… They are people without the level of maturity to understand that.
Who ended up losing their time more?
I was tempted to say that the software engineer that was trying to help the contractor 2 was the one that wasted their time but, to be fair, it was the contractor 2 themself.
They lost a good opportunity to learn a lot of things, and they just treated the job as a chore: give me a list of things to do and I will do.
No improvement in their part, it was all a big waste, but the most waste was for them.
Conclusion
There are people that don’t want to improve and need to be left alone. We cannot convince them, nor push them or make them feel menaced by the leaders with respect to self-improvement. We need to accept that there is people that it is not cut out this way.