Working with difficult employees

Every manager has those employees who are just difficult to work with. And even if one of them leaves, it seems like someone else steps up to take their place. How you interact with difficult employees (whatever the reasons may be) really defines who you are as a manager and your other employees are definitely watching you. Your mindset, your approach, and how you define your expectations for employee behavior and performance will determine your success.

“Mindset: Our traditional approach to difficult employees is to march down the path of progressive discipline – oral warning, written warning, suspension, and termination. It seems we are often more interested in building the file against the person, than making the effort to understand what the problems are and how they could be fixed. Addressing this process as a way to build individual employee responsibility for expected behavior/performance (vs. trying to punish them) means you are now working with your employee to positively resolve a problem. It is the employee’s responsibility to behave and perform to the job description. You are there to remind them of that responsibility. Of course, this means you clearly define those expectations and hold them accountable. This is, unfortunately, where we see so many managers falter.

TAKE THE TIME TO NOTICE AND TELL PEOPLE WHAT THEY ARE DOING WELL.

Approach: As human beings, we often can see the speck in someone else’s eye but not the log in our own. How we approach a conversation with a challenging employee is critical. The first 30 seconds of the words coming out of your mouth will set the tone. Will you provoke defensiveness and tumble into a downward spiral of debate, or come across as a coach that is truly interested in helping an employee improve their prospects for long-term employment and rewarding work? Here are five questions to ask yourself before ANY interaction you have with a difficult employee:

• Did the employee clearly understand the standard, expectation, or policy in question?
• Did the employee know, in advance, that such conduct or behavior could be subject to corrective action?
• Was the problem behavior/performance reasonably related to the safe, efficient, and orderly operation of the business?
• Is there enough evidence that the employee actually did violate a standard, expectation or policy? (or just hearsay?)
• Is the action you may be planning to take reasonably related to the seriousness of the problem, to the employee’s record with the organization, and to the action taken with other employees who have been involved in similar situations?

Start off the conversation in a matter-of-fact manner with words like “Joe, I have a problem and need your help.” This shows that YOU have the problem and need THEIR help to fix it, which helps reduce defensiveness. If the conversation turns defensive, then back-pedal to restore a condition called “safety.” Safety, in this context, is based on mutual purpose and mutual respect. Mutual purpose means that we want the same thing – good working relationships and quality work performance. Mutual respect means that despite our differences of opinion/politics/culture/etc., we will speak respectfully and not yell at each other. If it comes to that, then part ways for a while and come back later when the adrenaline subsides, and you can be rational (vs. emotional) again. As a manager, if you stoop to disrespectful behavior or flexing your positional power, you set the standard very low and make it a lot more difficult to retain or regain respect.

Defining Expectations: As an HR consultant for the past 30 years, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked with a manager/owner about a problem employee situation and when I ask, “Does the employee explicitly know what your expectations are?,” I get the response “Well … they should know by now!” And therein lies the problem. It seems to be very difficult for many managers to clearly define appropriate behavior and work performance. Job descriptions are a good place to start, but it really is more about having that on-going dialogue with your employees regarding what is going well on a job, and what isn’t. We often only talk with people when something bad happens and ignore the great quantity of good things that most employees do on a daily basis. Take the time to notice and tell people what they are doing well! That defines what your positive expectations are, and chances are you’ll get more of the good behavior you made the effort to notice. Your positive words alone can be a great reward.

We all do what we do for a wide variety of reasons and we can’t hope to understand how any one person got to their place in life at this moment, and vice versa. We CAN try to understand what influences behavior – our own and others – and work to address those influencing factors to improve our results. Usually, it comes down to a combination of six types of motivation and ability influencers: personal, social, and structural motivation and personal, social, and structural ability.* Understanding these can help us both diagnose problems and craft solutions.

Conclusion: Although some managers are naturally good at doing this, the skills described here are definitely learnable. No one is perfect at this all the time (we ARE human) but you can learn to diagnose where you went wrong and go back to address it again. It’s a manager’s responsibility to get work done with and through other people, and that is no easy task. Improving manager skills can be a great way to promote good employee relations and retain talented people by working through difficult problems. Will you still have to terminate some employees? Yes, of course, but when addressed with skill and respect, that should become a rare occasion. Google did research a few years ago called “Building a Better Boss” and came to this conclusion: “What employees want are even-keeled bosses who take time for one-on-one meetings, who help people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who take an interest in employee’s careers and personal lives.”

That’s the kind of boss I want, and the kind of boss I’d like to be!

Deb Marshall can be reached at dmarshall@wipfli.com. *Based on concepts from two great books – “Discipline Without Punishment” by Dick Grote, and “Crucial Accountability” by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan and Switzler.