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Difficult Employees
Leadership is like athletic achievement. Natural ability helps, but coaching is needed for peak performance. Whether you are a new supervisor or experienced manager, our free coaching tips can strengthen your leadership skills.
DIFFICULT EMPLOYEES TOPICS
All successful managers learn how to shift their leadership style to work effectively with different types of employees. While most people fall within the “normal” range of behaviors (whatever that means!), some have characteristics that are rather extreme. When confronted with these behaviors, managers sometimes aren’t quite sure how to respond.
Managers become very frustrated with employee performance problems, but often don’t take time to do “detective work” on the cause. Before talking with someone about a performance issue, give some thought to possible reasons for the problem. And here’s a key point to consider: as the manager, you may inadvertently be contributing to the situation.
Every job is the responsibility of two people: the employee, who is accountable for producing desired results, and the manager, who creates the environment in which the employee works. When confronted with a performance issue, the questions below may help you sort things out.
As a manager, you need to differentiate between employee problems that simply call for a coaching conversation and those that require a corrective action discussion. Corrective action should only be taken for serious performance issues. These occur when an employee either exhibits behavior that cannot be tolerated or does not live up to agreements made in previous coaching sessions.
More and more people are working with colleagues that they never see. In a recent study of U.S companies having more than 5000 employees, Brandman University surveyed 135 key managers about their use of virtual teams (http://www.brandman.edu/research/), finding that 40% of the companies already use them extensively and 56% expect their use to increase.
Some groups are tough to manage. When members have conflicting interests, personal agendas, or aggressive personalities, meetings can deteriorate into pointless debates or angry conflicts, thereby wasting time and harming relationships.
If your team seems to be headed down a destructive path, set some ground rules before blindly leaping into a discussion of issues. Unless your group is truly toxic, members will usually agree to a reasonable set of guidelines. Then, when things start to get out of hand, remind the wayward members of these agreements.
The only thing certain in this world is change. And whenever something changes, people have a variety of reactions. This may be due to the nature of the change or the different personality types involved. But regardless of the reason, managers who want to implement change must effectively respond to the different reactions of employees.
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