Anonymous Answer

I managed a development team consisting of 15 developers and QA engineers. One of the biggest challenges I have faced was a junior developer who did not work well with others and frequently tried to do things his way and would not listen to more experienced developers. After hearing complaints from my team, I talked to the problem developer about concerns that he had about the conflicts to try and hear both sides of the story and find a solution that would benefit the entire team. He had problems with the design of the application he was working on, so I let him draw out what his solution would be. While his solution was not optimal, I did not want to call him out on it. Instead, I opted to use the Socratic method of teaching by asking him questions about how the application would respond under various different circumstances and eventually he drew out an application structure that was identical to the initial application design and he came to the understanding that it was the correct route to go. In other instances when that developer would have a disagreement or a different idea, he sometimes had good suggestions and we adopted his suggestions into our development plan. After doing that exercise with him and after adopting some of his good ideas, the developer had a change of attitude and became easier to work with.