Been there, got the scars.
First thing, explain to them in writing how their behaviour impacts the team as a collective, not just you specifically.
If the behaviour persists, put them on a performance improvement plan. Specifically outline the behaviour that needs to change and importantly: hold the whole team to the same standard and scrutiny.
Three outcomes in order of likelihood:
- they take the hint and leave
- they improve enough to get the PIP off them
- you have justification for disciplinary actions including termination.
It’s a drain on your time and energy, but it’s a sure fire way to create an actionable record of this employees bad behaviour.
Make sure your boss and your skip-level are aware you’re taking this action - there’s nothing they can do to stop you doing it, and if they’re genuine they’ll appreciate that you’re putting in the effort to set this guy straight.
A slight left-field suggestion, but have you tried asking this 'competent jerk' if he wants to go for a coffee (or pint, depending on your culture)?
He might just not be aware he's being a jerk, have you tried having a casual, non-confrontational chat with him and raising your concerns?
ie "I respect you as an engineer but you can be difficult to work with sometimes"
Maybe he just isn't aware?
Sometimes you just need to communicate more and build alliances
The devil's advocate would lift a few points. The OP equates disagreement with conflict and sees the main cost as being loss of status and "hurting team vibe". They seem to make a point that their own main contribution is bringing stability (good vibes?) to the team.
It could be the story of a weak or unaware engineer/employee that has been promoted to a level they thought implied some sort of impunity. Because being reviewed or questioned weakens the public perception of them, they experience it as unfair and toxic. Using the word "trivial" to characterise critique directed towards them could be emotionally rather than technically motivated.
Life's too short-- tell your manager you can't work like this. You resign unless something is done about it. If they value you, something will be done about it.
Have you discussed with HR? Toxic employees should be their responsibility too.
As others suggested, take note and proof. Start by copying the exact same content you've published here, and complete it with new toxic behaviour. What will create a body of proofs HR will need and will "expel it" from your head.
I would also meet your manager's manager, this situation has taken too long to resolve and your manager is not doing enough (as far as we know at least). Ask your N+1 whether he has heard of the situation, if he has not your manager is in troubles.
Finally, you have not described how others employees are living through this situation, they may be upset to and be able to help: - they can report the employee behaviour - they can react when the employee is not behaving correctly - they can provide feedbacks, ideas, support?
I wish you all the best, this is a hard situation you're living!
a few ideas:
- see if he can be put on a project that he has complete autonomy over that is separate from the normal work that you are doing. or try and come up with something that he could do separately and doesn't need to be in meetings.
- split the team up so that he leads his own team. if he's that bad the people on his team will leave and his behavior will be that much more obvious. if he's a good engineer maybe he can actually get stuff done with him separately. if he's bad it's an easy case to make. if you make the decisions about who works on what give him the work you don't want to do. you're two levels higher and it sounds like he doesn't have much leadership experience.
- you said in one of your comments that your manager doesn't want to look bad to his manager. what could you do to make him look good and also get rid of this guy?
- can the bad guy move teams to something he likes more? where could he go that doesn't necessitate him working with you?
- make the business case that this guy is bad and not worth keeping. if he's already gotten rid of one good lead and burning out other people, I'm sure you can make the case that keeping him is not worth the cost. if his behavior is preventing you from shipping x% faster or higher quality or whatever it shouldn't be that hard a sell to management.
- whatever route you take document everything that he does that is preventing the team from accomplishing more.
- are the other people on your team reporting this behavior to your manager? if enough people are complaining and your manager doesn't do anything, he's clearly not doing his job.
- the skip level talk is also a good route. see if people that he interacts with that aren't your manager or teammates have difficulty with him. if he's that toxic you have more ammo with your skiplevel or anyone else with influence.
He is using meetings as a dominance/humiliation ritual, and disagreement as an insult delivery mechanism. He is in disagreement with the hierarchy, uses disagreement to show defiance because he wants to be the leader. He also perceives he does not have much to lose by doing this because in the worst case scenario he will just go be an individual contributor elsewhere, and in the best case scenario you would leave, your role would be vacant and he may be eligible for it again.
The first thing you will do, is to talk to individual people by name. Do not ask open questions that everyone can respond to, because he will use that opportunity to be toxic. If he does intervene in a toxic way, you will continue addressing the person you were talking to, by name, and not pursue his talking point. This is fair game because you were not talking to him.
Secondly, instead of having long meetings with the entire team about every topic, you will have a general high level meeting with the team, and dedicated meetings for navigating the actual solutions with specific team members. You will not discuss solutions at length in the front of the entire team, and if you do, see the point above. You will also try to have clear agendas and expectations for meetings.
Thirdly, if he wants to initiate a conversation, try to scope it to what he was working on. Until you mobilize him to work on something else or ask for his opinion, other initiatives are not his primary concern. You can ask "tell me how the initiative X is going", or "what are your current priorities at the moment" to frame the conversation, and steer the conversation so that it stays on topic. If he refuses to answer just say "he will revisit your priorities later" and talk to someone else.
Lastly, if he operates outside the direction given by you as a lead, or consensus of the team, document it. And if it has consequences, document them. Create a clear paper trail that shows that he is not an individual contributor that can be mobilized towards a goal and is a liability for the organization.
Until he fixes his attitude, never ask for his advice in terms of "what would you in this situation if you were me", but you may ask others this.
This sounds incredibly frustrating. But given you're in the leadership seat, it's worth taking a hard look at yourself asking how you're playing a role in this, especially since it's unlikely people are this difficult for no reason. I am rather a bit skeptical of this account as written.
One hint: he was told he was meant to be the lead. That's a bit of a shitty promise to be given and taken away.
This guy is almost certainly operating from a place of "status injury." He sees you as the person who took his job.
So, some hard questions for self-reflection:
Knowing he felt slighted, did you ever try to build an alliance with him and acknowledge his expertise? Or did you just expect him to fall in line?
Are you showing him respect, or just demanding it because of your title?
Are his arguments over "trivial things" really trivial? Or is it his (unproductive) way of trying to assert the technical authority he feels you're ignoring?
Right now, your manager hears a personal problem ("This guy is a jerk to me"). That's why he's giving you the weak "don't let it bother you" response.
Stop making it personal. Use your leadership skills to actually lead this person. Try to fix the relationship. Give him ownership.
If that fails, you can go to your manager with a leadership problem ("I've tried A, B, and C to leverage his skills, but his behavior is still causing X business risk"). That is a problem a manager has to solve.
Do you have someone functioning as senior engineer? That person should help establish the direction. Sometimes people think they are smarter than the head engineer and you get a lot of non congruent engineering that is hard to unwind from. I’d review the landscape and see what support you and your team is getting and what support this guy is getting. Who does his reviews? Do you have input? Could you influence his removal or not? He may be resentful that he is not running the team. After reviewing what levers you have, I’d consider meeting him in your office. Let him know you want to discuss some things. Let him know you will want to hear from him. Explain that it’s a challenge running the group, historically there have been issues even before you showed up. Point out that many skills are needed to run the group, and when he acts a certain way, it’s way harder for you and his is also demonstrating he is weak in these executive level skills. Then listen to him in his points. Discuss if relevant. Does he have points or is he a nut. Then, tell him you need to re-baseline expectations. Explain how things need to operate. Summarize the discussion in email and send it to him. Separately send a write up to your boss in the conversation. Again, this is not an attempt to throw him under the bus, just to get him aligned with direction. But if the re-baseline of expectations fails, you can work to take more steps regarding his review. I wonder if your team does not have a good well defined engineering leader.
I obviously know absolutely nothing about what is really going on.
>I'm tired of the status and perception games and his overall impact on the team vibe and culture.
I have never heard this sentence said by anyone who wasn't deeply invested in status and perception games.
>He says the difficult engineer is improving and sees him trying. His feedback to me is not to let it bother me so much. He asks me what he should do to change his behavior (he's the manager, not me...).
Which kinda shows that your manager does not agree with your viewpoint. If you take his words at face value, he is pretty much telling you that you are the problem.
Again, I don't know what is really happening. But if I read between the lines the picture seems to be the following: You have a engineer in your team who thinks you are a looser and incompetent. This is why he second guesses you at every point, because he does not believe that you can make adequate decisions. At the same time other coworkers "love working with you", I am absolutely sure they do, but I guess that they have very little respect for you as a leader, they love working with you because it allows them to do what they want. The opinion of your boss towards the "problem engineer" seems quite positive, which also suggests that your manager does not consider your judgements of your teammates as particularly relevant.
If you take all of this together the picture becomes quite clear. Nobody respect your leadership. Your staff doesn't and your manager doesn't.
Once my boss told me: “You can’t force people to do something they don’t want to do.” And this guy just don’t want to work well with you. Period.
I learned one approach that sometimes works: Figure out what they want and give them what they want. But with the condition they change their behavior. From your post, it sounds like this guy wants to be promoted.
If I were you, I would talk to him like this:
“Look, you are good technically. You should be promoted. But higher levels here mean more than just code. It means mentoring, working closer with peers, hiring people, training them, helping management. We have a career path in place, let’s make a plan for you.”
In big companies it’s even easier. Use the promotion track. Show him what’s expected. If he wants the title, he has to play the role.
Three things can happen:
He rises to it: He starts acting more professional, helps others, builds trust. You win, he wins, team wins.
He tries and fails: He’s exposed higher up. He has direct reports. He’s in meetings with management. He can’t hide his behavior anymore. Eventually, they’ll act.
He says “no thanks”: Then it’s clear. He just wants to stay where he is and make your life harder. At least now everyone sees it.
This puts the pressure where it belongs. On him, to live up to what he says he wants.
[Edit]: You can also tell him that if he wants the promotion, he has to start acting like someone at that level. That means following the principle: “There are no mistakes, only lessons we learn from.”
Tell him: "There was an outage. OK. Then step up. Take the lead, organize a post-mortem, and work with others to find real measures that prevent it in the future. Not to assign blame, but to help the organization improve."
Maybe you don’t even join the post-mortem, let him own it. Just make clear: this isn’t about finger-pointing, it’s about building a culture where problems lead to better systems.
“There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.” —Albert Ellis
One idea is to give him a special feature to build that you make up, that's neither critical to operations nor interfering much with everything else that you guys are doing.
Make it something big. Something where he might get a team of his own, eventually maybe. He'll feel important and will go and work on that thing for months that noone actually gives a shit about, and let everyone else in peace.
Like for instance, if your main product is a website, convince your manager that you need to develop the same website but as a native app, and that this guy should be doing it. Hopefully that never makes it to production.
A few things here.
The first is dead stupid but it tends to work with these sort of people. You need to be very question focused. The "correct" answer to every question you ask from here on out has to be NO. Is the sky purple today... NO. Is really dumb thing a good idea... NO.
> I get pushback on calling for a post-mortem
You're the lead, so just assume that you have cart blanche to just book the meeting. Set it up... If they say NO, just agree and have the meeting with the rest of the team. Let them exclude themselves.
> His feedback to me is not to let it bother me so much.
This is probably good feedback. What if they were more abrasive but amazing at the job??
> expecting conflict every time we're in the same meeting
Call him out on it. In public. Out loud. Dont be nice about it. It's time to tell him to "cut the shit".
Your other job, every day in the shower, or making coffee your ritual is to think of a new and interesting way to say NO. At some point your gonna get good at this (and its a life skill I swear). Have the one liner ready. And if he follows up "we can have a chat about this after the meeting" or "lets take this offline"
> was told by a previous director that he was meant to be the lead of this platform. Hence the fighting with the other lead from a year ago. And with me over the past year.
Have you (or higher ups) pointed out his immaturity and behavior are likely the exact reasons he wasn’t selected to lead the team, and if he continues on this path he is ensuring he will never advance at the company? That could do one of two things… get him to shift his attitude or find a new job where he can advance.
Do you have the power to get rid of him? Competent or not, this behavior sounds toxic to the team and likely isn’t worth it. Assuming what you said is accurate, as we’re only hearing the story from one perspective.
If you've already managed to assert your boundaries and they've failed to respect them, then your boss is failing to listen, do their job, and maybe simply there to collect a paycheck and follow the path of least resistance rather than have a backbone.
Try to have them see the light or you'll need to find somewhere else to be for your own sanity. Maybe bring your boss a copy of the No *sshole Rule by Prof. Sutton.
Never put up with excessive toxicity because silence gives consent and your feet vote. Just as there are many other workers, there are many other jobs.
First, that sounds hard. I'm happy that you're asking for help and I hope you find the help you need.
Next, you'll probably get a bunch of advice about leaving immediately, how you don't have to put up with this nonsense, and so on. I consider this advice well-meaning, but it might not take into account the complicated web of constraints that you face, so I recommend interpreting "You should get out there now!" as something more like a supportive "You don't deserve to live like this!" True, but not necessarily enough on its own to formulate a plan to address your quandary.
In response to your final paragraph especially, it sounds like you need to have a real, frank conversation with someone who can help you navigate this situation. One in which you can get into the complex details of the situation and balance all your competing needs and desires. I say this because, sadly, you will not be able to solve this problem by running away from it, because it will find you again and you'll be even more tired and even less interested in dealing with it. You probably need more than "Get out and take your people with you".
If you'd like to try to have this conversation, then I think I can help. You can start with my handle here, search the web, find out more about me (to judge for yourself whether I might be able to help you or I'm full of shit), and then contact me. If you think we might click, then ask me for help. Ignore anything that you see along the way that looks like a price.
Meantime, any advice I can offer will sound like a platitude, so I won't bother. The reality of the situation is much more complex than that. Instead, think about what you'd like to have happen and maybe we can figure out how to make it happen.
Peace.
Man, I’ve been there. It’s exhausting when one person drains all the energy out of the room. You can fix processes, but not someone’s ego. At some point, it’s on the manager to step up — not you.
Next time tell him that if he isn't going to provide something constructive to the meeting, that he won't be allowed to join further ones.
As long as you make it clear from your tone and wording, that this is not you being aggressive in any way but you protecting the time of the team from distractions, the rest of the team shouldn't see you any different than before.
See the no assholes rule. Paraphrasing here: Life is too short to work with assholes. If you work with an asshole tell your boss to fire them. If your boss won’t do it, quit. There are plenty of places where you don’t have to work with an asshole.
How is he disrespecting you? "Respect" means so many different things to so many people that it is difficult to say what it is about his behavior you find intolerable. Maybe the answer is for you to grow a thicker skin because you won't ever be liked by everyone.
Ignore the guy.
Never give up against him. Push through your ways every single time.
Sooner or later he’ll get the point and he’ll leave.
There is advice to talk to upper manager or HR. You could do it, but it won’t solve the issue. If it was easy, there wouldn’t be these problems in the first place.
In situations like this, the best solution is expose externally and leave.
Have you brought it up directly with the other person?
Ask the QA people on the team if they have problems with him. Get a different manager involved...
You can’t fire or remove people on your own team?
Don't let one insecure coworker convince you that you're the problem. You're clearly adding value and doing the right things.
The manager is spot on, how can passive aggressive comments even annoy you. Should run off like water. You are feeding the troll and complaining about it is not leading. Burnout means you are taking this personally which it isn’t since any lead will get the treatment. If he is really incurable toxic give him enough rope.
just sock that foo dawg
Everyone's different and the way that teams work differ massively from company to company, but this is how I've done it in the past. First off, doesn't matter if you're the technical lead or the team lead, it's the same role for responsibilities sake. A technical lead is responsible for the deliveries and a team lead is responsible for the actions.
That's your winning hand right there. "Yeah I hear you, but I'm deciding as the lead to do X". Shit sandwich style you can wrap it with "I love this! Keep these coming! I need to know perspectives and ideas, no bad ideas remember, keep them ALL coming! I promise as long as we're not too toasty with too much going on, I'll listen and I'll keep doing that as long as you're happy that when I have to put my foot down, I can do that". Then the foot down statement. Then the "..but seriously, lets get a proper ticket in on this, yes I've decided what we're doing but we should still recognise the full story here so {insert annoying persons name}, write up a full ticket on your perspective here into the techdebt pile and tag me when it's done so I can cross reference it with my Architectural Choices doc."
In every way you're constantly saying "I am king here". It's not up for discussion, it's not debatable, it's not a choice it's a fact.
...finally if you need to revert to the 'At the end of the day I have to decide what I want to end up in court with, and right now I'm thinking this. Again I'm happy to hear different perspectives, but at the end of the day someone has to make these choices as the lead and today that's me."
...now if the annoying person starts to actually play the game and then starts actually feeding potentially good ideas, then great, you start getting them onside with "keep em' comin'!" and an occasional "...see this is perfect, I can't see everything, I can't know everything, I need us to be growing this picking the best choices and having you do this is excellent!".
...and if that starts happening, you might be growing a strong right-hand-man, I've seen people before that were underachieving but potentially capable pull themselves up and become awesome members of the team, truly carve out a niche for themselves. Sometimes they need a kick up the arse and sometimes they just need to recognise that they need to kick themselves up the arse :)
First of all, I'm sorry to hear you're dealing with a person like this. It reminds me of a guy who was on my previous team. Relatively competent. Stuck at Senior. Had a lot of issue seeing (often younger - myself included) engineers getting promoted to Staff, Principal, etc. over him. Knew that he had an incredibly toxic and abrasive personality and thought merits alone should allow him to move up the ranks. He would reign it in sometimes after people complained either to him or to the manager, but he'd go right back to his old ways a few days later. So. Frustrating.
Anyways, my advice is: document. Document specific instances of behavior that you see that is toxic or disruptive to the team.
It sounds like this person needs to go - or someone else needs to start addressing their behavior with them. Either scenario will require that person (your manager, skip level, or HR - or some combination) to have examples of specific instances of behavior that needs to be addressed.
Others have recommended the empathy approach. Talk to the guy. Take them out to lunch/drinks/whatever. If you haven't tried it at least once, I agree it's worth trying. There's always a chance your reading things wrong or don't have the whole picture. But if you have tried kindness and understanding, and things don't change or they only change temporarily... I don't think the "kill them with kindness" approach will work in this case. It's the approach I tried in my situation and all it did was drain me and take away all of my excitement to work on the project he worked on. Because this person will never change and you can't make them change.
Whenever I've been around toxic people like this, I always use the "if everyone's a jerk, you're the jerk" heuristic. Because I certainly can lose my cool and be a jerk sometimes. Not always intended. So in order to ground myself, I ask: OK... who do I have problems with? Just one person? THAT person? Yeah. Anyone else? No... everyone else is pretty awesome! OK... what about them, have they expressed they have problems with more than just me? All but one person on the team!? Huh. Yeah... That seems off. It's far more likely they're the jerk.
Certainly not a hard and fast rule. But it's helped me stay sane through abusive relationships both professionally and personally.
Last point - unless this person reports directly to you, they're not your responsibility to fix. If you've talked with them and expressed frustration with the _behavior_ you're observing, you've already done your part. Your management needs to step up. If they disagree with the state of reality, then figure out why there's a disconnect. That's where documentation is your friend! If you can convince another coworker to do the same and they also can provide documentation that corroborates or supplements, even better. I wouldn't be too afraid of being clear to your manager that this is something that you need fixed in order to feel comfortable and productive at work. It doesn't need to be "it's me or him". Make it about how _you_ need help from your manager. If you can show them that effort has been made on your own to address the situation and it's not working, then any competent manager should work with you both to find some sort of path out of this. If they continue to refuse (especially if multiple team members are expressing the same thing) then I would consider escalating to your skip level and then to HR. Chances are, assuming this person really is a jerk, that these people are already aware of what's going on. If no one seems to care that a bad personality is dragging the team down, then that's a huge red flag on the company culture as a whole and I would gtfo as quickly as I could line a new job up.
Good luck. I hope you can find some relief here. Life is too short to put up with other people's crap.
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You don't seem to have gained his respect with your engineering skills.
Publicly challenge (and beat) him in a small engineering contest, otherwise he will never respect you.
Make it time limited, eg. 3 hours to implement a specific goal with clear indicator of what is "better" as a score, ie. to avoid arguments that eg. "mines fast, mine scales". Have a neutral party pick the challenge.
VP of Eng here. If we take your statements at face value, your manager isn’t doing his job. Toxic employees are death to companies and it’s management’s job to get rid of them. (After attempting to address the issue. But my experience is that toxics are gonna toxic. Don’t coddle them.)
If you’re willing to lightly scorch some bridges, talk to your skip-level manager. If that doesn’t work, or you don’t want to, your best option is to go work for a decent manager, either at the same company or another one. Life’s too short, and you’re not going to be able to fix the toxic employee.
In other words, get someone who can help, or get out. Take your friends with you.