Your suggested approach sounds like a pretty reasonable way to handle it – breaking tasks down can help if the “invisible teammate” is not pulling their weight because they’re just overwhelmed (either by the work, or by outside problems). And the regular check ins and chats will give you early enough warning to redistribute if the guy’s just looking to coast through without doing any work (assuming you can’t persuade him otherwise).

The way you’ve described him, he sounds like he could be either be a “coaster”, or he was out of his depth and gave up and switched off rather than asking for help – both can look identical when you don’t know someone. In my experience, the latter was usually pretty glad to have some manageable tasks that he could actually feel he’s making a contribution with. (Nobody likes being the dunce of the team.)

Could it also have been a contributing factor that the rest of you all knew each other – hard to break in to an already functioning team?

Maybe pairing off on some tasks might have been one way to deal? I know this was a common tactic on my degree, where we had a lot of team work. It’s easier to get started if you’ve got someone else to bounce ideas off, and also can be easier to admit problems to one other person instead of the whole team. If you switched around the pairs for different areas then it keeps the “equal team members” and takes the load off one person.

Or you could have a team lead who effectively steps back a little bit from the actual project work so that they can manage the project as a whole. It might seem a bit of overkill to do this on a four person project, but it takes a surprising amount of time and effort to track who’s doing what, when, and how it all needs to fit together. And if you have a five or six person team, then I think at that point some kind of “coordinator” role becomes essential.

There are two answers that I would give to this question, first is the sort of cop out answer that I would do my best to try to avoid getting into the situation to begin with. But because prevention won’t always work, here are a few things that I would try to do differently:

- Identify the issue at an early stage of the project
- Start trying to improve the situation as soon as it is identified.
- It is case dependent, but in looking specifically at what happened this time I would firstly try to assign the individual very detailed and direct tasks, nothing big picture. I would then go over explicitly what the expectations were for his work and along these lines set some firm and frequent deadlines for his tasks. I would also check in on them on a consistent (probably weekly) basis to ensure that everything was on track, and if it was not I would attempt to figure out why not.
- I would also try to understand the individuals motivation (or lack of) to see if I could use that to spur them to do more/better work.

To sum up, I basically would actually actively address the situation rather then just sitting back and hoping it got better.

–Steve

You said you learned lots from your experience. What would you do differently next time?

Adam