How to Manage Difficult Employees Who Produce Great Work
Managing Difficult Employees- When coworkers are put together and asked to work and cooperate with one another, there will always be issues that arise. Personality types clash and coworkers won’t always see eye to eye on everything. These people are being asked to work with one another, day in and day out, so it’s important to understand how to manage these situations when they come up. This is a key component in developing management skills.
There are many approaches that you can take to help manage and diffuse workplace conflicts, but things can get more complicated when you have other factors involved, such as different seniority levels among battling employees, different positions, and different skill sets. Things can get really messy if the difficult employee is also your best employee. Below, we will talk about how you can go about managing difficult staff members when they happen to also produce great work.
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What to Do When One Employee Is Difficult
One of the key components of becoming a manager is learning about dealing with difficult employees on an individual level. When a staff member starts to create friction in the workplace, the most important thing to do is to not overreact. Everyone will have a bad day once in a while. In most cases, small conflicts will blow over and resolve themselves. Intruding on these problems may only magnify an issue that doesn’t need to be addressed at all.
If, however, a pattern of this type of behavior is established, that is when some type of intervention is required. In these instances, it is the job of manager and team leader to identify patterns of disruptive behavior and work towards putting an end to it.
Placing Expectations On The Employee
There are different ways to deal with employees like this. There should be an expectation placed on the employee to be able to listen to criticism and work towards creating and maintain a disruptive-free environment. If they are not able to make the changes that are needed to maintain harmony in the workplace, the best course of action may be to remove them from the equation entirely.
What to Do When That Employee Is Your Best Employee
This is simple so far, but what happens when they are not able to adapt to change, but their skills are invaluable to the company? This creates a whole new set of problems that are going to be a lot more difficult to deal with than simply letting the employee go.
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When you are in this type of situation, there are two things that you have to balance against one another: You have to treat them differently and maintain a fair work environment.
This is a difficult tightrope to walk. If you are too blatant with it, other employees will pick up on that and it will increase conflicts in the workplace. If you don’t do enough to diffuse the situation, employees may become frustrated with the lack of involvement. Again, this can affect the workplace negatively in a variety of ways.
Giving Them Special Treatment
You won’t be able to get away with treating this type of employee the same way you treat anyone else. These types of employees will usually demand special attention and treatment one way or another. Certain employees respond better to individualized attention and they will resist being treated the same as anyone else.
If you can show them that the skill set that they bring to the company is valuable, they will likely be more willing to cooperate with their coworkers and it can make them more receptive to what you are asking them to do.
The dangers of this are that the other employees may see that they are receiving special treatment. This can cause further resentment, and it may even accelerate the problem.
Understanding the Risks of Special Treatment
When you give an employee special treatment, it tends to have a negative impact on the rest of your staff. This is magnified when that special treatment is given to a problematic employee. Other employees will view this as their company rewarding one of their coworkers for acting out and causing problems.
This will create resentment among coworkers and it could lead to bigger issues down the road. This is why the decision to give focused treatment to problem employees may not be such a good idea after all.
What We Recommend
When you find yourself in a situation like this, we think it is best to take a cautious approach towards the problematic employee. Take them aside and try to find out why they are causing the disruptions and what you can do to remedy it.
Sometimes you will find that their demands are unreasonable, or they just have the type of personality that will always invite conflict. There is a point where you have to be able to decide if they are worth keeping around or not.
We recommend giving them individualized attention and monitoring their reactions to it closely to see if that extra attention is working at all. The aim here is to show the employee that they are important to the company with the hopes of them repaying that in the form of increased cooperation. If you find that it is not making a difference and the employee is continuing to cause disruptions, you should begin looking for other solutions.
These alternative solutions may include changing the position of that employee or separating them from their coworkers. Moving them to a different department will allow you to keep them employed within your company while hopefully removing the disruptions that they have been creating.
If All Else Fails, Are They Worth It?
The ability to complete work at a high level is just one of the many factors that should be expected from a good employee. If they are not able to adjust and compromise, we would argue that they cannot be considered a great employee, even if their work comes out perfect.
Consider this before you decide to take on the risks that come with giving a troubled employee special treatment. Even though they produce great work, they may still have an overall negative impact on your company.
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