Would I Trust This Person with a Nail Gun? Or, How to Manage a Team

In the Burning Man Community (drink!) we do a lot of big, often bad, experimental installations of art. Often, we burn these pieces down in the desert and then laboriously clean it all up. The lifespan of these pieces is about a week. The art is fully experienced only by the people that come to Burning Man. Photos and videos are often posted, so some aspects of the work live on after the burn. However, it's hard to be inside of a photograph, or to climb on a video. 

Construction with wood is what we generally do to make these pieces happen. In order to put it together, we need nails or other fasteners.

Enter the nail gun. 

A nail gun is a handheld power tool that shoots nails into materials like wood. It does so with enough force to take the place of someone with a hammer pounding away over and over until the nail is driven. It's a huge time-saving device.

Burner art is made with volunteers. These are people from all sorts of backgrounds that are donating their time. These people may have never picked up a nail gun before, and may or may not have good judgment in either the general or specific sense of the word. They are, after all, Burners. 

So, when assembling a team to get something ambitious done, the question comes up. Would you trust this person with a nail gun?

If the answer is yes, then you proceed.

If the answer is no, then what type of no?

Are they only a danger to themselves? Is this the sort of person that would shoot themselves in the foot within the first hour? Well, at least you get an hour's worth of work out of them. This is a team member that you should probably avoid, if only because you as an organizer or team lead is going to be the one sitting in urgent care or the ER with them waiting on someone to attend to the new hole in their foot and googling "how to get blood out of car floorboard". 

That's not the team member that you should be most worried about, though. The one you should be more worried about is the team member that would turn the nail gun on other people.

Those folks you need to get rid of, as soon as they show their true colors. Better yet, you need to avoid having them worm their way onto your team in the first place. 

Team members that harass, abuse, attack, sabotage, goldbrick, lie, trick, prank, or otherwise make life hard for others, *no matter their claimed or demonstrated technical competence*, must be separated as quickly as possible. 

They are showing you that they cannot be trusted with a nail gun, and they aren't just a danger to themselves, but to others. 

The danger, when it's in power mongering, bullying, racism, sexism, bigotry is just as damaging as it if was a metal shard aimed at someone's head or eye or hand. 

Believe people when they show you who they are, and show them only the door.