Ask HN: How to deal with overly-confident-sounding team members
While confidence can be a good thing, it’s not always. In our team meetings, a few people tend to dominate the conversation, periodically talking at length about things they don’t understand, and this will engage our manager, who also doesn’t understand, and this can go on for minutes. I try to interrupt at times to correct them, wait until they’re done to correct them, or just give up and let them say inaccurate things and make bad decisions. I want to be more assertive, but when I do, they can be defensive and sometimes hold a grudge, at worst making it their life goal to take me down.
Have you found any successful ways of handling these sorts of communication problems, and are there any books or talks you’d suggest?
I usually try to say things like “that sounds like a promising idea, there’s something I’m confused about though”. Or “I really like your insights on this, one thing I have a knowledge gap on though is…”
Basically if someone has an ego, make them feel like you’re not saying they’re wrong and you’re hoping they can teach you, and through that slowly guide them to the points they’re wrong about. If you get to the topic, like say they argue AWS EMR is cheaper than a lambda for doing some small simple process (insanely dumb idea) and you mention that you’d thought lambda pricing was cheaper and they say “no it’s not” to shut you up or stop the debate, I’d recommend having a small 1 point research spike to get pricing differentials just to make sure, since it’s small effort and it can help with cost estimates in the future either way.
Basically avoid saying they’re wrong, treat everything like a knowledge gap, and an opportunity to explore something to build team knowledge
Also if you do these things and get no where, talk about it with your manager in your 1:1, cause that sort of behavior really reduces a teams effectiveness, youre all working together so if you have concerns they’re not your own vendetta, they’re a desire for your team to be more effective and to improve work satisfaction