Are ghosts haunting your team?

If you haven't asked yourself the following dead-serious questions, you may be costing your team resources and your company money:

• How many ghosts are on your team?
  
• How malevolent are they?
  
• What will it take to exorcise them?
  
• How can you ward off new ghosts before the haunting begins?

The "ghosts" in this context refers to resources that linger with your team long after they have ceased to be useful.
Ghosts can be employees you took too long to manage from the team. Too long in the sense that the damage they have done—to project, process, or morale—will require more extensive and expensive resources to repair.
Just this week, a member of my team—referring to erroneous software defects that had been logged by a former staff member—joked...

"I haven't gotten much real work done today. I spent all of my morning chasing the ghost of Bob."

Other good examples of ghosts that haunt teams include outdated processes and tools that have outlived their usefulness and no longer constitute an efficient means of getting the job done.
When someone says...

"...but that's the way we've always done it."

...they are likely possessed by one of these ghosts.
The last house hiding ghosts are those pet projects, purchasing missteps, and buried mistakes that no one wants to discuss. Get those skeletons out of the closet before the bones start rattling. Most likely, they are long-passed smelling.
Don't be afraid. Face these demons head on. The longer you take to exorcise them, the more malevolent they will become—leaving your team paying dearly for them years after they are gone.