Many years ago I started working with a new member in my team.
He had a reputation of a very hard working but extremely stubborn personality. That’s why he was not very well seen by his team mates. They felt many times irritated by him insisting to get into some specific details or insisting on his own opinion. I started by delegating him a few small projects and stick to our 1on1s. I wanted to know him better and give him space to express and argument his opinions.
I discovered that he had an extremely beneficial orientation to detail, a deep understanding of the processes he handled and fantastic learning and adapting skills to anything new – especially when learning to use new platforms. He was challenged about this and motivated by a strong desire to prove himself.

So I then gave him a very challenging cross teams project. 💪

The success of this project meant decreasing close to zero a significant number of long time technical tickets, handled by multiple teams, with the aim to improve end customers’ experience.
It involved a lot of follow up and implementing small but constant changes in the cross teams way of working.
It took him just a few months to obtain the first major success – a decrease of the tickets volume by ~ 60%. How did he do it? He kicked off discussions and setup a follow up flow, based on a reporting structure he created and implemented himself. He set regular meetings, sent regular meeting minutes and constantly showed the progress made, engaging all teams.
When I congratulated him in our 1on1, saying “thank you for your persistence, it was the one that tremendously helped see so much progress in this project”, he replied “You are the first one to tell me my persistence is a quality. Ever since childhood I was told to stop being stubborn…”.

📌 The morale: be curious about the people in your team and discover their strengths under what might look as faults; it might pay off more than you think.