Somewhere along the line, managers and employees inevitably find themselves working alongside what’s charitably known as a “difficult” person. You know the drill: that guy who compulsively disses colleagues behind their backs … the chronic complainer who sucks up co-workers’ time the way a vacuum truck gobbles up sewer sludge … the slacker who doesn’t pull his or her weight and often misses project deadlines … the confrontational bully who steamrolls over more submissive employees.
At best, they become corrosive white noise in the workplace. At worst, they cripple productivity, contribute to employee turnover and deflate workplace morale — especially if managers fail to take action, which happens more often than not.
“At some point, most managers practice what I call psychic management,” says Marie G. McIntyre, a nationally known management consultant, employee coach (www.yourofficecoach.com) and the author of Secrets to Winning at Office Politics: How to Achieve Your Goals and Increase Your Influence at Work. “They think a lot about an employee’s performance problem, but don’t take the next step and talk to them about it … and eventually, they get pretty worked up about it. And when they finally confront it, the conversation tends to not go very well.
“Managers need to learn how to develop a plan for presenting the problem to an employee in a way that actually makes a difference — helps the person understand what the problem is,” she continues. “We assume they know they’re a problem, but they usually don’t. So it’s important for managers to issue an invitation to change. Psychic management is not going to do it.”
In some instances, managers don’t take action because, though it may sound counter-intuitive, challenging employees can also be top performers. As an example, McIntyre points to an employee she supervised years ago who was a very good corporate trainer that consistently received great evaluations from workshop attendees. But the employee also took up an inordinate amount of McIntyre’s and colleagues’ work time by sitting down and complaining at length about personal issues.
So what’s a beleaguered manager to do? McIntyre recommends giving behavioral coaching a try, which requires a specific set of strategic actions aimed at changing the challenging employee’s negative behavior, and creating an environment that helps them do so. Here’s what she suggests:
1. Make the employee aware of the problem. In a non-confrontational, face-to-face meeting, the manager must — without scolding — point out the offensive behavior, keeping in mind that the employee might be blissfully unaware of it. “These challenging employees can get so caught up in their emotions that they truly don’t see reality,” she explains. “Most effective people can choose their behavior … they decide how to act, as opposed to being driven strictly by emotions, such as anger or anxiety. If you want to act that way at home, that’s fine. But it’s not going to work for you in the office.”
2. Specifically identify the problem. Too often, managers — especially those averse to confrontations — undermine their own efforts by talking about the employee’s problem in what McIntyre calls fuzzy terms: You have a bad attitude. You don’t communicate well. You don’t show enough initiative. These comments center more on the employee’s personality than on the specific behavior that requires modification.
Instead, managers should specifically identify the offending behavior, as well as describe why the behavior is a problem; if the manager can somehow quantify the negative ramifications of the employee’s behavior, all the better. For instance, instead of McIntyre just telling her chronic-complainer em-ployee that she talks too much, specify how her impromptu, gabfest interruptions prevent other employees from getting their work done and derail projects.
Managers should also explain how the employee’s behavior could be preventing them from reaching a professional goal, such as a promotion.
3. Propose a specific substitute behavior. To resolve the above-mentioned scenario, McIntyre says she suggested going out to lunch once a week, which gave the employee a time and place to vent where it didn’t interfere with work. “It worked fine with her,” she says. “I used motivational levers — figured out what motivated her behavior. She wanted interaction and attention. We structured it so she got her attention — at lunch on Fridays. This gave me a way to manage her out of my office.”
4. Follow-up with feedback and encouragement. Changing a deeply entrenched behavior can take a long time. So managers need to frequently praise an employee’s efforts and encourage them to keep working on implementing their substitute behavior.
While going through this process, it helps immensely if managers possess a basic understanding of human behavior; that is, realize that all behavior is goal directed. This is true even if the employee’s inexplicable behavior hurts them more than helps. Some employees act like children and sulk, then refuse to say why when asked; managers can counter that by no longer asking what’s bothering them. In other words, just like parents who must deal with difficult children, don’t reward the behavior you don’t want, McIntyre warns.
“In most cases, difficult employees are trying to meet an emotional goal, not a rational goal,” McIntyre points out. As an example, she cites a client who received a poor performance review because she insisted on taking vacation time without notifying her manager.
“The obvious question was why didn’t she just ask her manager first?” McIntyre notes. “She said she didn’t understand why she had to, because it’s her time to take off. She was in a power struggle with her boss, and her emotional goal was to feel in control and send a message to her boss.
“So we talked about how emotional goals get in the way of rational goals that would result in a better performance review — and possibly a new job,” she adds. “Employees have to keep in mind that most of the time, if they go to war with their boss, they’re going to lose.”
Of course, some difficult employees are impossible to rehabilitate. In those instances, termination is the only solution.
“A toxic employee — one whose personal agenda runs counter to the goals of the group — will suck the energy out of your team,” McIntyre says. “They like to cause trouble, spread rumors and so on … and take up so much time and energy that a cost/benefit analysis definitely ends up on the cost side.”
Absent that, however, managers should develop a game plan and prepare to coach ’em up. Psychic management alone just won’t get the job done.
