I had a call from a client who told me of a dreadful problem they had with one of their employees.
"How long has he been with your?" I asked. "Twenty two years." She told me. "How long have you had the problem?" I enquired. "Twenty two years." She replied.
How can this happen? Don't people notice after a year or two? Here are some of the reasons for the problem continuing.
Merry Go Round
There are some changes going on in your division and you are looking for certain skills. Guess what? A colleague has someone with exactly those skills and more. It's too good to be true - so you take them into your department. Then, too late, you discover the awful truth. You have been sold a lemon. So, at the next opportunity you pass them on. This happens year after year. No one ever has the person long enough to tackle the problem.
Give Him a New Manager
You give your difficult person to a new manager (sometimes a new trainee). The new manager arrives and has no idea of the history of the difficult person and no idea how to deal with it anyway so they leave it. They don't get much support and so the problem grows.
No Records
You have an appraisal system, but people don't use it effectively. No one wants to put anything negative down in writing. So your difficult person sails along for years with an average rating. No one incident is quite bad enough to warrant action. Sometimes they even get a pay rise because no one wants to tell them they can't have one.
People develop ways of living with it
A man went to his doctor. He had a small frog growing out of the top of his head. "When did this start?" asked the surprised doctor. "About a year ago; it started with a small pimple on my bottom." Said the frog.
We get used to dealing with long-term problems. I once worked with a department that was completely organised around one awkward person. Every manager rotated jobs every six weeks, just so no one had to work with this person for longer than six weeks at a stretch.
It's just the same as living with your old wallpaper. It's not till you have re-decorated that you realise just how tatty and tired the old paper was.
We are all frogs
If you put a frog into hot water it jumps out. If you put it into cold water and slowly heat up the water, the frog gets cooked. It never knows when to draw the line to tell it that the water is too hot. Should it be at 68 degrees or 69 degrees?
It's just the same with problem people. We put up with the last problem, they caused so why not just live with this one?
Let sleeping dogs lie
There are some problems that especially lend themselves to this excuse. The person who just can't take feedback - so we don't give it to them and the problem gets worse. The person who might attack us back, so we avoid talking to them about any problems they have caused. In the mean time the problems carry on or get worse.
Promote her out of the way
How many times have you seen people who didn't have the skills being promoted into another job that they still don't have the skills for? Clients often ask me how a particular person could possibly have ended up in such a senior position. There are many reasons for this. Here are a few:
- Poor promotion criteria.
- People too frightened not to give the person the job.
- People concentrating on only the technical aspects of the job.
- People imagining that somehow a person will just rise to the challenge.
- A person being put into a more senior post and not getting the development.
- All the other candidates are even worse.
- Poor promotion procedures.
In my mind one of the most damaging situations can arise when someone who habitually uses bullying gets promoted. This leads to a situation where they have more and more power, it becomes more and more difficult to tackle the situation and there are fewer and fewer people in a position to do it.
Tackling the Problem
The cost of leaving these problems to grow and multiply is huge - and that's not just the financial cost - there's the cost on the health of those involved.
It is important to recognise that simply getting the person out of the way or just leaving it is making a decision to throw away money and time. Added up over years this could be phenomenal. Make sure you are not wasting your own resources on something like this. Get it someone to help you and sort it out.
To get help with problems like these, call me on 01530 224295 or have a look at our set of six booklet especially written to help you in these sitautions:
Solving Management Problems
This set includes these titles at a bargain price:
- Attendance Management Tips and Techniques. How to identify the problems of poor attendance and deal with them including what to say when you discuss it with the individual.
- Feedback for the Faint-Hearted. How to give feedback even in those very difficult situations.
- How to Deal with Poor Performance. How to recognise poor performance and what to do about it, including how to handle meetings with the individual and what to say.
- How To Motivate Yourself And Others. What causes motivation problems and how to resolve them (and what you might be doing to make them worse).
- Questions Made Easy. This is a vital part of dealing with any performance issue. This booklet goes through different questions for different situations and how to use them most effectively.
- The Quick Guide to Dealing With Difficult People. How to recognise different kinds of difficult behaviour and what to do about each (and what not to do).
