[rdtwo]

Go around is a valid strategy, eventually your entire team will go around the difficult person and the difficult person will no longer be part of the solution chain essentially relegated to obscurity. Works in big teams with sufficient overlap not in small ones

[TameAntelope]

I literally don't know how else to deal with certain categories of folks with whom talking and trying to resolve the issue has no effect.

Going around them/ignoring them is literally the advice you get from basically every literature I've read, and I've read a lot about this.

But you do have to try to work through the issue first, and you have to be willing to try again if they seem open to resolving the problem down the line. Never write someone off completely (for professional disagreements).

[NotPavlovsDog]

What would you suggest from your readings?

I've mostly benefited from hard realism approach and Actor theory (as applied by some: everyone has an agenda, to work with them: Align, make Peace, or Destroy).

[TameAntelope]

It's actually a bit of a gap -- everything I've read tries very hard to assume positive intent; people will cooperate if you can create a sense within them that they can express themselves without fear of reprisal or judgement.

The reasoning in the literature for avoiding this topic is sound. If you provide the "destroy" option to folks, they're usually going to go with that pretty quickly, and only nominally go for the other methods of resolving conflict.

I've had someone make that determination about me at a previous role, which then put me obviously in a "what do I do with this person?" position which itself led me to the "ignore/destroy" answer. If it hadn't been an option, would this person and I have had a more pleasant working environment?

[NotPavlovsDog]

I've been collecting on that gap in personal interviews, I have observed it as well. CMS (Critical Management Theory ) had some tidbits that I found useful, since they criticize mainstream management and describe some of the tactics avoided by mainstream research.

[cosmodisk]

This seems to be working best for me so far.

[Seirdy]

Soft agree. Going around people isn't always as borderline-sociopathic as people in this thread make it out to be. For example, the given solution for handling the process-obsessed is surprisingly non-toxic: encourage them to favor incremental change to give them the time to learn and grow their strats enough to come up with something that's tailored to the team.

[bredren]

I had a “hostage taker” running devops and CI on a project last year that I had warned the product owner about multiple times.

This person would not respond to basic developer experience problems and could not get a release out the door without some manner of basic code merging problems.

Repeated direct and polite feedback would not move them an inch. It was like they knew they didn’t have to change and could keep their job.

The manager should have been able to identify this and handle it but they were distracted and not able to do it.

Eventually this hostage taker‘a failure to execute and complete sandbagging of any attempt to wrest control over deployments endangered a major new enterprise sale.

We went around this person, rebuilt what they had been responsible for and got back to work completing the product.

They were sidelined and let go eventually and the project is way better for it.