“I let him live rent free in my head…”
“I let him live rent free in my head…”
That was how one manager I was coaching described the predicament he faced when dealing with a difficult employee at work. He explained that he had became obsessed with trying to change this individual’s negative behaviour to the point where he thought about the issue 24/7. “It became a battle of wits”, he added.
We’ve all been there to one extent or another. Dealing with difficult employees, is a common challenge faced by all managers in every workplace. According to a study by the Society for Human Resource Management, over 60% of managers report having to deal with difficult employees at least once a month. [1] I believe that it is the most difficult part of the job for most managers, and when faced with a really difficult employee for a prolonged period, it can take all the pleasure out of day-to-day life. Work can become a battleground.
In this article, I’ll explore some common features of difficult employee behaviour and provide tips for you on how to handle them effectively. In doing so, it goes without saying that there’s no magic solution to any of these problems. But in my experience, whilst we can’t really control the mindset and behaviours of others, we can control our own reactions to them and the important point when faced with a difficult employee is not to get sucked into a downward spiral to the point where, like our poor friend above, you essentially hand over control of your mental wellbeing to another individual.
I’ll begin by making a distinction between temporary and ingrained difficult behaviour.
1. Temporary Difficult Behaviour
Things will happen in any organisation which might cause employees, individually or collectively, to turn sour for short periods. People have personal issues that can affect their performance, and there are a range of occurrences at work which can generate a degree of unhappiness amongst all employees. Perhaps a decision taken, a misunderstanding, or a problem faced will turn the mood sour for a while. In reality, everyone has the potential to be ‘difficult’ on occasion, so dealing with employee-related problems of that nature is simply a fact of life and all managers have to regularly face such issues at work. Handling these temporary occurrences is relatively easy if you think about the following points:
What trigger has caused the change in behaviour you are seeing? Have you any control over that trigger? If yes, can you change things to alleviate the problem?
If not, can you at least communicate with the individual or group on the matter? Sure, you may not be able to solve the underlying issue, but listening always helps.
A big part of the solution to temporary difficult behaviour is to apply your coaching skills and in most cases if you do the right things in that regard then you can move beyond the problem.
2. Ingrained or Prolonged Difficult Behaviour
This type of behaviour is somewhat different and occurs when certain individuals spend a large proportion of their working lives in a difficult state, often without any real or obvious reason. They struggle to be positive, cooperative, engaged and can display a whole host of other problem behaviours: selfishness, rudeness, bullying, passive-aggressive, whinging non-stop, sabotage etc,. the list is long. Often, they are fairly clever too, in that they are not so problematic as to warrant dismissal, but they manage to walk that fine line, often for some time. Such characters may well be in the minority in most organisations but you still need to worry about them because, apart from the obvious challenge they present to your authority, if allowed, they can do significant damage to the morale of others.
It is this ingrained behaviour that causes most stress for managers, I find, and when it does arise it’s the type of conflict that can allow someone to creep into your headspace over time. In an important study on this issue, Will Felps, Senior Lecturer at the Australian School of Business [2], and his colleagues, defined three categories of difficult team member behaviour, which they argue is especially likely to damage an organisation if left unchecked:
Withholding of effort: ‘Withholders’ intentionally dodge their responsibilities to the group and free ride off the efforts of others. Some examples of withholder behaviour include things like “not completing tasks or contributing adequate time, not taking on risks or responsibilities, or not disclosing aptitudes in the hope that others will compensate.” In everyday terms, Felps describes these characters as ‘slackers’.
Being affectively negative This, the researchers argue, typifies a person who continually expresses a negative mood or attitude. They also found that inherently negative individuals were more likely to “exhibit an awkward interpersonal style and to more frequently express pessimism, anxiety, insecurity, and irritation”. In doing so, they affect the motivation and mood of others. These are alternatively described as ‘downers’ according to Felps.
Violating important interpersonal norms The researchers described individuals in this category with the truly lovely phrase ‘interpersonal deviants’. In addition, they identified seven common behaviours associated with such characters: making fun of someone, saying something hurtful, making an inappropriate ethnic or religious remark, cursing at someone, playing mean pranks, acting rudely, and publicly embarrassing someone. In plain speaking, Felps describes these individuals as ‘jerks’.
These categories are more than someone having a bad day, or underperforming in the short term. Of particular interest in this study was what Felps and his colleagues highlighted about the impact that difficult employees of one kind or another can have on group effectiveness and outcomes. They found that “having a bad apple in a group will have a negative impact on the group production-related processes of motivation, creativity, and learning as well as on the integrative processes of cooperation and conflict. Without these processes in place, groups fail.” In other words, these characters are not merely annoying or frustrating for others in the group, but directly damage the team’s overall performance.
Additionally, Robert Sutton, a professor at Stanford University and bestselling author of The No Asshole Rule, [3] argued that negative employees are “remarkably contagious” and that leaders who ignore them are “setting the stage for even their most skilled people to fail”.
You are certainly already familiar with the annoyance value of problem employees but the clear message from the research is that they can do a whole lot worse than annoy if you let them. This links to a final point worth pinpointing in Felps’s research which relates to the common responses to difficult employees seen in the workplace. Essentially, apart from avoidance, the researchers grouped the reactions as follows:
Motivational intervention – this describes the range of actions undertaken to change negative behaviour through the application of influence tactics, which might include positive activities such as coaching, or negative responses such as the withholding of praise, respect, or resources until the behaviour changes.
Rejection – actions intended to minimise or eliminate interaction with the negative member, which can either mean ejecting them from the group or, if that’s not possible; isolating them – in other words, sending someone to ‘Coventry’.
Defensiveness – described by the research team as those acts which are intended to protect and repair one’s own sense of autonomy, status, self- esteem, or well-being. In other words, when people feel powerless to get rid of the problem individual, some begin to respond in negative ways themselves and this is one way in which negative employees – if not dealt with – bring the worst out in others. This is why avoiding the issue is particularly harmful.
It’s therefore clear you cannot ignore prolonged dysfunctional behaviour, but the key question of course is what can you do about it? Here are some general considerations:
Get your recruitment right: Dealing with difficult employees is always painful, so the goal should be to screen new applicants so closely during recruitment that you minimise the potential for a disruptive individual to join the team in the first place.
Don’t ignore the problem: Obviously you need to deal with a difficult employee as early as you see a pattern emerging. To let them underperform, even for a short period, establishes a precedence in their mind that it is acceptable to behave as they are. Act early.
Control yourself: You should understand that these scenarios create stress triggers in you, and this in turn can cause you to lose ‘control’ which is never a good idea. And often that’s what the difficult employee is seeking to do. So, the starting point is to stay in control and assertive when dealing with them. The moment you allow emotions to drive your actions in these circumstances is the time you lose the ability to think rationally, so you need to avoid that at all costs.
Focus on performance not personality: Often in these circumstances, the negative employee will try to shift discussions onto the personality side of things: “you just don’t like me” or “you’re picking on me”, and so forth. This is simply a form of deflection and you always need to be very clear as to how they have deviated from the expected level of performance, with specific examples of what they have done wrong.
Seek advice: It is also important at an early stage to notify your superiors and indeed HR that there is an issue and that you are attempting to resolve it. Once it moves beyond run-of-the-mill problem behaviour it’s time to flag it for others and seek their advice on how you can manage through the situation. You will still try to resolve it on your own, but they now know it’s an issue and can monitor progress from afar plus you can benefit from their wisdom.
View it as a process, not an event: Changing difficult behaviour is never an ‘event’ but a ‘process’. Be realistic as to what you can achieve on the first intervention. Of course, you do need to begin by attempting to coach the individual through the difficulty and when doing so, if you can achieve even small improvements then in this context that is an achievement in itself.
Turn the screw with time: Now, this might seem harsh but if an employee refuses to respond to your (effective) coaching, then you do need to move to a more directive approach over time - note: directive does not mean aggressive. Until this point, you should have avoided overtly threatening them with consequences, but now the employee needs to be made aware of what must change, what support is still available to him or her, but also what the potential outcomes from failing to improve will be. In this way you are beginning to impose a solution in the sense that you are describing the outcomes that are expected in clear and unambiguous terms. Then, rather than dealing with every minor daily issue that arises, you might review progress every two weeks, or monthly, and discuss what changes have been seen, or not as the case may be.
Get others actively involved: If they do not respond to the coaching, then it’s often useful at this point to get another manager – your boss, or someone from HR – involved, to play a mediation role, whereby they try to bring a fresh perspective to the relationship and see if they can bring the employee around.
Plan their exit: Failure to respond to this more directive approach will unfortunately require you to move fully into a disciplinary process as set out in your organisation’s standard procedures. You have now tried coaching, guiding, directing and mediating: eventually there has to be an endpoint and consequences.
This may seem like a very drawn-out process, but unless the employee has done something entirely unacceptable, or completely against the rules, it’s one you need to follow. Failure to do so will potentially result in you having to deal with an unfair dismissal claim as you didn’t follow due process and best practice. When I discuss this issue with managers, even the very experienced ones, I can often see the frustration in their eyes; undoubtedly, employment rules are at times weighted in the employee’s favour, but there is little alternative than to work through a process similar to that above. It’s also why ensuring that you keep such characters out of the business in the first place through effective recruitment is so vital.
Throughout the many years I have spent advising managers on this issue, as mentioned, a big part of the problem I frequently see is that some managers allow the conflict to turn into a battle of wills with the individual in question, or get goaded into an overtly hostile or aggressive response; doing so will cause you untold stress, so you must avoid falling into that particular trap. Whatever you do in confronting problem employees, it’s important to be proactive about it – especially these days as you cannot afford to carry even one negative employee – as well as being structured and consistent in your approach because, as Robert Sutton puts it, “the behaviour of assholes damages individual well-being and also impacts corporate profits, mostly because it reduces people’s commitment to the organization and drives out some of the best employees.”
My final point is that whatever happens don’t let them get inside your head. Try to look at it this way: you are forced to deal with that difficult employee for 8 hours or so each day, for five days a week. Somebody else has to live with them for the rest of the time.
There is always someone worse off than you!
Thanks for reading.
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References
[1] Society for Human Resource Management. (2019). The high cost of a toxic workplace culture: How culture impacts the work environment & company performance. https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/research-and-surveys/Documents/SHRM%20Toxic%20Workplace%20Culture%20Report.pdf
[2] Felps, Mitchell, and Byington, “How, When, and Why Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel:
Negative Group Members and Dysfunctional Groups” (2006) Research in Organizational Behavior, pp. 181–230.
[3] Sutton, Th e No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t (Reprint Ed., Business Plus 2010).