Encourage your pet pessimist:

Do you have a pet pessimist at work?  Good.  Every organization should have at least one.

Pessimists matter.  They enhance your decision making and protect your success by balancing overconfident optimists.

As always there is a price to pay.  Pessimists take more effort to manage and they exhaust everybody on your team with their negativity.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  Here’s what I suggest.

Take your pet pessimist aside.  Tell him, or her, that you’ve noticed how, sometimes, the quality of decisions improve when he puts on his unhappy face.  Now ask for his help.  Say that what you really need is a fully-functioning devil’s advocate, not just an unhappy face.

What you want is someone who knows the art of releasing hot air without pricking the balloon.  This is a skill, not a dysfunction.  Pessimists thrive on dysfunction, so don’t feed the dysfunction by talking about it.  Instead, encourage and reward the skill.  Good luck.

I’m James McIntosh at nonsenseatwork.com