How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining?

From the article:

> Complaining is not a character flaw; it is a response shaped by context, past experiences, and unmet needs such as recognition, belonging, or agency. When leaders interpret complaint only as negativity, they risk silencing the very signals that reveal what people care about. By seeing complaints as expressions of care in disguise, leaders can move beyond irritation and instead use inquiry to uncover underlying concerns, redirect energy, and invite ownership. In this way, what begins as frustration can become the raw material for contribution and engagement.

I'm not a manager and have no aspirations at all to be one, but I have worked with plenty of "complainers".

Usually what complainers complain about has nothing to do with why they are unhappy. Way too often frustration with people is pointed at circumstance rather than trying to productively sort out the conflicts between the individuals.

And here is where management usually fails. A person complains about unrealistic time plans or how crappy a product will be, so management jumps into action and invent over elaborate processes around securing deadlines and quality, rather than splitting up the dysfunctional team that can't / refuses to cooperate and therefore is always late and produces sub-par quality. And the team will still be late and produce bad quality, and the complainers will still complain.

This is true in some cases…but there are other people who just complain because they want attention.

Good managers listen and try to understand the difference between a person complaining because they’re closer to the problem and a person complaining because they are the problem.

There are plenty of people who complain because its baked into their personality. Those people can also work at a bad place and have a target rich environment so to speak.

The only sure fire way to avoid this label being applied unjustly is always bring solutions, not complaints. Document your solutions and let it rest if leadership doesn't agree.

This is typically what I see. There ARE chronically negative people, but more often “complainers” are the smart people who don’t rely on passive voice and jargon to get ahead or, having been ignored for years by the passive voice jargon cheerleaders while their concerns came true, are bitter and punching the clock.

Spoken like from someone who never managed teams. There may be valid complaints but there may be also just difficult characters.

To answer the original question: It's a bit like in romantic relationships. Trying to change personalities of others is a tough game (usually not worth it).

Not a manager, I'm an IC.

I strongly disagree. Noticing the fires is often trivial. Complaining... It depends. Complaining constructively is fine. Complaining for the sake of complaining gets annoying very fast.

Also... People that spend a lot of time complaining are usually that aren't capable of making things happen anyway. They can only see the limitations.

I avoid those people I noticed they just bring down my mental focus.

This is the hardest part of dealing with a chronic complainer: they think they are the only one "noticing a fire" and "getting sidelined" for raising flags.

Often there isn't actually a fire, they're complaining about trivialities. Everybody already knows about the fire because they've complaining about at every meeting for three months. Or the thing they are complaining about can't be changed. They're actually getting sidelined because they interrupt company allhands to ask the CEO irrelevant questions, wasting the time of 50 people and no one likes them anymore.

I view dealing with chronic complainers as mentoring them to stop self-sabotaging themselves.

That's a great call but it should be paired with a promise: you present your great plan and then we'll put it to a vote. Otherwise you are just trying to get rid of them with busywork.

> A good way to partition the complainers into serious and unserious groups is to ask for a written plan

This can be good but I've seen it weaponized before by an incompetent cto to deflect and delay any change. He would ask for written proposals on the most minute details until people just gave up trying to fix anything.

As an obscure stand-up comedian once said, "initiative has to be punished with following it up".

Many years ago in my software engineering course, my professor said that he would add to Fred Brooks' concept of a "surgical team" and said that he found that many successful engineering teams had a "team mother": the person that helped quell disagreements, remembered birthdays, cheered the successes no matter how small, kept tabs on how folks were doing emotionally, etc. Years later in my professional career, I found this to be true and met a few people like this on my teams -- not the best engineers, but additive to a great team.

I think that successful teams may have a place for a "team canary" (?): someone that is going to speak up about points of friction where most others might just end up with apathy and learn to deal with the inefficiency or friction (a "that's just how it is" attitude). Sometimes, complaints are a sign of genuine friction. Complainer may not feel like they have the authority/allotted bandwidth to remove the point of friction. When this happens, give this person some ownership of the friction points and see what happens.

I had worked with a guy which is smart, or at least persuasive, since him was hired somehow. He after started working with the team, him complaining about the project proposal, about the bad code decisions and had serious discussions with the product owner. After I talked with the PO, I opened a meeting with the complainer to extend my hand and say that I was opened to listen, him thanks me but preferred to stay a little away. The CTO proposed that since him spotted a bad code (it really was), him had time to analyze better and fix! In the end him lost 2 or 3 weeks fixing the code, wasn't able to finish and request resignation directly to the HR with the reason that the team and the project was bad, probably criticized the CTO. I had to take the code him left and finish the fix!

I think some of the most important problems get hidden if there is a culture where you expected to also want a specific solution before you complain. People avoid reporting difficult, complex problems without obvious solutions. Maybe they just see somethings as "the way things are" at that org or that leadership doesn't want to hear their needs.

Better to have a free, easy ability to complain about things, and if there is a good manager hanging around somewhere, they can synthesize the complaints and discover if there are solutions possible at the org level, which individual contributors might not know about or even be functionally able to own.

For most practical problems, the answer is usually, "well, it depends. There are no clear solutions, only tradeoffs"

It seems as if the leadership in this situation hasn't even considered that they may be in the wrong and the points brought up maybe valid. So many teams set unrealistic deadlines or expectations based on dates plucked from the air and then wonder why work can't be completed on time.

That enormous sticky header!

Not comic sans at least.

I guess that the person who complained that it is hard to read was treated as an issue and told they are slowing the execution.

It's fine if you can ignore them and don't have to work with them. If you do it's really draining. Constant negativity is not fun to be around.

I have only worked with one person in my life who was really like this though, so maybe you're just lucky and haven't experienced a truly committed negative Nancy.

That first link is on point in calling out "uptight armchair typographer cock-hats."

Comic Sans' only sin was being such a good font that it became "too popular".

Really, Helvetica and Times Roman should get at least as much criticism, but they get a pass for being suitably boring.