When a Team Member Isn’t Acting Like Part of the Team

“People always accommodate the most difficult person in the room.”
Shining City: A Novel, by Tom Rosenstiel

So many mission-driven organizations focus on improving and enriching the lives of individuals and families, enhancing communities, furthering understanding, and much more to make things better. Compassion and the desire to be responsive to needs is important in working with clients. However, when it expands into nonprofit management, manifesting as being slow to address the behaviors of a difficult staff member, it can cause dysfunction in the organization. In this post, I share one such scenario as a cautionary tale. […]