The most frustrating people to be with: those who make more work for others, rather than do real work themselves. I've been fortunate to have met only a few of them, over the years. They tend to ask unhelpful questions late in a project, to point out mistakes rather than offer fixes, and to propose broadening a task without considering the impact on the delivery timetable. When they do produce something, it tends to be a high-level "plan" or "strategy" without consideration of the real-world difficulty of implementation. They're not part of the team that actually has to do the job.

Such folks gravitate to dysfunctional organizations — but is that a cause, or an effect?

I blogged about this in Dec-2006 at http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2006/12/22/plus-minus-people/ opening with the old punchline: "..and then there was the man whose personality was so negative that whenever he left a party people would look around and ask 'who just came in?'"

(cf. BlameStorming (15 May 1999), ...)

TopicOrganizations - 2006-05-20

(correlates: PartOfTheProverb, HollywoodAndWashington, ComicFilters, ...)