I've seen a lot of examples of this, having been parachuted into a few failing teams. The most effective means I found of getting "hard to work with" people who genuinely wanted to be better, is to give them some freedom.
One pattern that I saw quite a bit was one team member being a bit more technical (rather than business focused), so they tended to cop a lot of the internal questions that caused them to context switch a lot. It increases their frustration levels and drops their performance. One effective way to solve that is to acknowledge what is happening, and put in some boundaries so the other team members know that (for example) Tuesdays-Thursdays you need to really be stuck before you bug XXX about your problem. It makes XXX feel better about the situation because not only has it been acknowledged they are a key team member, it also makes sure they get some quiet time to really get stuff done at their own pace without having to switch jobs all the time.
The other team members, knowing there are a few boundaries now, tend to become more self sufficient so you end up with a better performing team overall, and one that isn't so dependent on a single person.
Obviously there are other patterns that end up creating "hard to work with" people, but the example came up so often I think it's worth writing about.
One pattern that I saw quite a bit was one team member being a bit more technical (rather than business focused), so they tended to cop a lot of the internal questions that caused them to context switch a lot. It increases their frustration levels and drops their performance. One effective way to solve that is to acknowledge what is happening, and put in some boundaries so the other team members know that (for example) Tuesdays-Thursdays you need to really be stuck before you bug XXX about your problem. It makes XXX feel better about the situation because not only has it been acknowledged they are a key team member, it also makes sure they get some quiet time to really get stuff done at their own pace without having to switch jobs all the time.
The other team members, knowing there are a few boundaries now, tend to become more self sufficient so you end up with a better performing team overall, and one that isn't so dependent on a single person.
Obviously there are other patterns that end up creating "hard to work with" people, but the example came up so often I think it's worth writing about.