5 ways to salvage a difficult employee

Excerpted from the Executive Report: The Supervisors Guide to Managing and Motivating Difficult Employees

 

Firing a difficult employee is always an option, but it's not always the best option. Salvaging the person and turning him or her into a productive and reasonably cooperative employee is often better for the company.

 

But to do that, you must shift the responsibility from you, the supervisor, to the employee. The employee has to become responsible for changing.

 

After all, it's the difficult employee who has to change, not you.

 

There are five key steps for shifting the responsibility for changing:

1. Clarifying expectations. Tell the employee exactly what you want, in the way of performance or behavior, or both. And make sure the standards can be observed and measured. That's why you don't want to say, "Fix your attitude." There's no standard of measurement for that.

2. Provide training. You can't push someone out to sea alone in a boat and expect good results. Arrange training, and work with the employee to decide what training is appropriate and reasonable.

3. Specify consequences. Let the employee know the consequences - the bad ones for failing to change and the good ones for implementing change. That gives them a goal to shoot for.

4. Provide feedback. You can't expect the road to change to simply have a start and a finish. There's a whole area in between where you have to let people know if they're making progress and how much or how little.

5. Remove obstacles. Ask the employee what's preventing change. If you can control and remove the obstacle, do so. If it's up to the employee to remove the obstacle, make that clear, too.

DIGGING DEEPER

Getting difficult employees to turn over a new leaf isn't easy. To get help, check out the Executive Report: The Supervisors Guide to Managing and Motivating Difficult Employees

Comments

[Lara Boswell]

This is a good article for some employees in which the responsibility truly lies with them, however there is another type of employee that is often mis-labeled as difficult: The squeaky wheel employee that is trying to tell management that some thing needs to be fixed. It is this type of employee that many managers want to avoid, fire or push to the side that can end up being one of your best and most loyal assets if you simply listen to them. These are the kind of employees that serve as excellent temperature checkers of your workplace environment and deep down simply want to help and have a positive working relationship with the employee. If a manager can humble themself just a little bit to explore these possibilities and actually listen with a non-defensive ear, then a great employee can emerge from the effort.

[Lee]

I have found that the squeaky workers are easy to deal with after trying this,
They are more than welcome to compliant but need to have two solutions to right the wrong not off the cuff answers but well thought answers, after this is know you have a much more pleasant conversation with your employee and maybe get some good solutions to problems