My classmate brought up a problem he had with a soldier in his unit who was determined to undermine the group and the team. It was an interesting dilemma for sure.
I think we’ve all had to deal with similar situations as leaders but the one you describe sounds especially tough to deal with. In terms of “derailers” I’m in the midst of dealing with a few in our senior leadership team, but what I find interesting about all of these leaders is that if you pointed out to them that their actions were having negative effects, they would never come around to see it from your lens. So often we get stuck in our own perspective.
In previous classes, we spent a lot of time talking about self-authorship, and the ability to see problems from several different perspectives, understand that no problem has one solution and can be seen from several different lenses, or even that there are “ill-structured” problems, problems with no binary or right and wrong answer. According to Jonassen (1997), "these problem types do not represent well-defined classifications, but rather represent a continuum from decontextualized problems with convergent solutions to very contextualized problems with multiple solutions" (p. 67).
I've come to believe that there are also “ill-structured people.” People, we want to understand and want to help come around, but it’s just not ever going to happen, particularly in the way that we hope. These derailers I’m dealing with will probably never come around, but by finding some small area of alignment I hope to limit the divisions they cause. When I read about the person you were dealing with I thought of this idea of “ill-structured people” and how they interact in teams.
Reference
Jonassen, D. H. (1997). Instructional Design Models for Well-Structured and Ill-Structured Problem-Solving Learning Outcomes. Educational Technology Research and Development, 45(1), 65–94. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30220169
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