If you have experience in management, you know that it isn’t all a cakewalk. You can read all you want about workforce theory, but in the end, you’re often confronted with particular issues that rest more on a person’s personality than that on the essential fundamentals of manager/employee relationships. To put it another way, you’re going to have these cases where you’re dealing with unusual and extraordinary types of people, and it’s a game-changer.
So what do you do with the difficult employees in your teams? If you said “just fire them,” you’re missing the big picture. Managers need to know how to handle a wide range of situations in order to keep the business running well. Here are some tips for dealing with three of the major categories of problematic employees that you’ll probably meet up with.
Flakes
Being flaky or flaking on other people is now endemic in our social lives, and it’s pretty common in the work world, too. You can argue about whether social media and other technology advances make the problem worse, but it often just comes down to people’s choices and personal philosophies.
You may have someone who is skilled at passing the buck, who protests that every problem has been forced upon them. You may have someone who simply slips out the back door when the going gets tough, and lets everyone else do the hard work. Regardless, those difficult employees who are shirking their responsibilities are harming the team.
The good news is that this is a pretty easy category of people to manage, assuming, of course, that they respond to some basic elements of effective management. What you have to do is create more concrete rules to stop people from goldbricking on the job. That might mean quotas or hard and fast rules for collaboration, or different types of rubrics for accountability. But a large part of the work is getting these things in place, and making sure people follow them.
Ego-Brain
Then you have a whole other category of people who may be toxic in a business environment. These workers will generally perform their jobs pretty well. The problem? They’ll see themselves as bigger and more important than they actually are, and they’ll project that on other people. You may have someone who has some kind of narcissistic disorder, and insists that everything be about them at all times. You can have someone who’s so self-assured of their brainpower that they will challenge other people’s ideas, even to the point of flat-out insubordination.
Handling this demographic can be a little more complicated. One rule is to put these difficult employees with other strong personalities, not in with a set of people that they can easily dominate. You may have to remind them at times “who the boss is,” in ways that frankly seem a little juvenile. In general, someone has to stand up to the ego-tripper to make sure they understand that at the end of the day, they’re still in a hierarchy, and they have a particular role in a business.
Coiled Snakes
Then there are people with aggressive personalities. They’ll be extremely defensive about almost everything. They’ll often be extremely negative about the business in general, and whine or complain about various policies much more than anybody else. In some cases, these aggressive types of people are the ones getting in trouble for sexual harassment or workplace hostility. In general, they’re not going to take criticism, and they can be downright nasty.
To a certain extent, management can go all the way toward disarming these people with friendly but firm communications that remind that person of their boundaries. For example, a performance review is something that is extremely hard for a negative or defensive person to get out of. They’ll have to hear the feedback and take it in their own way.
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