The 4 Worst Mistakes Managers Make With Difficult Employees
Are you making one or more of the 4 worst mistakes managers make with difficult employees? I personally made them all at one point before I was taught exactly how to transform 80%+ of difficult employees into good team members. As a manager, not being able to remove people problems in your team – or be effective in managing difficult employees – is one of the most career damaging and job limiting skillset gaps to have.
The costs to your business in terms of lower team performance can easily be many multiples of your salary and these costs keep growing over time. If you don’t know how to remove people problems in teams, OR you are not skilled in removing people problems, then what we discuss today will help you close that skillset gap.
The 4 worst mistakes managers make with difficult employees
- Putting up with small problems
- Responding with anger and frustration
- Failing to build support for action
- Failing to incentivise improvement
All of these can lead to ten of £’000s to potentially millions in lost team performance costs to the business. Being responsible for increasing business costs results in lack of career progress for the manager or the manager might lose their job.
Even worse, resolving people problems in a positive way in any team is taking a set of interdependent steps in the right order and VERY FEW managers are taught how to do this. As many of you have found out, having a few conversations and asking for improvement on its own rarely works.
I was getting nowhere with my first difficult employee, until I asked for help from my best manager ever. As soon as she taught me what to do, the problems in my team vanished in weeks. Since then, I have never worried about taking on minor people problems all the way through to nightmare employees. Learning to avoid mistakes managers make with difficult employees will make your job ten times easier and less stressful.
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Three Outcomes Managers Typically Achieve
There are three outcomes managers typically achieve when dealing with difficult employees being:
- They put up with the problems
- They remove the problem individual
- Lastly, they improve the problem individual
For any manager to maintain or improve their credibility, authority and job security, you must either remove or improve the problem individual. For untrained managers, removing is a lot easier than improving when dealing with difficult employees BUT it is a lot more costly to the manager and the business.
putting up with the small problems – The first big mistake managers make with difficult employees
It is really easy to put up with small problems in teams. You don’t have to risk potentially upsetting staff members or having a difficult or awkward conversation with them. It is easy to think “I will speak to them if the problems get worse” so you keeping putting off taking sensible action.
This is one of the worst mistakes managers make with problem employees.
Taking no action with small problems means:
- You are communicating to them through lack of action that their performance or behaviour is okay. This encourages them to get worse
- The rest of your team sees the problems and your lack of action, and at some point, will start copying the problem person.
- Your authority is threatened. You have set expectations, but you have not enforced those expectations with actions. This eats away at your credibility.
- As little problems turn into bigger problems, they are much harder to resolve and remove and doing so takes longer. Human behaviours are very pattern based. Break the patterns before they become established.
- All of the little problems add up, reducing team performance, and thus how well you are doing your job in the eyes of your bosses.
As soon as any team member crosses from the line between acceptable and not acceptable, you should speak to them about it. Take action straight away and don’t ignore the small problems. Keep tackling the small problems and you won’t have to deal with big problems very often because the problems rarely become big problems.
The second big mistake is responding with anger and frustration
Any team member potentially damaging team performance creates a personal threat to the manager. Before I knew how to get improvement from difficult employees, underperformance, poor behaviour and disruptions in the team would leave me feeling angry, frustrated and fearful. I didn’t want my bosses thinking poorly of me.
For managers with difficult employees, feeling personally threatened is a very common response. Our brains are wired for fight or flight as a response to threats. This hasn’t change in thousands of years. Our rational thinking shuts down. As part of the fight response, we get angry, and we want to remove the threat quickly.
Managers have the power to make life very difficult for a person threatening them and potentially remove them from the business. It is easy to respond with demands and implied threats. This is one of the worst mistakes managers make when handling challenging staff.
Threatening staff members creates a similar fight or flight response in your team member, and the situation can rapidly spiral downwards. This situation typically results in the employee leaving the business or you removing them. This can easily be a costly option for you, your team and the business, even if it is easy to fire people in your country.
Avoid responding to people problems in your team with anger and fear. You will make the situation WORSE.
Free Webinar
To learn exactly what approach to take instead, that maximises respect, appreciation and improvement from your difficult employee, register for our free webinar on The Quickest & Best Approach to Remove People Problems from any Team. Do take a look so you avoid the worst mistakes managers make with problem staff.
The third big mistake managers make with difficult employees is failing to build support for action
There is a very big difference between a manager individually asking for improvement and a manager, with the support of their boss and HR, asking for improvement. Think of it as one person vs a group asking for improvement. The latter feels a lot more serious, involves more pressure and the person’s job security is much more at risk. All this increases the pressure for improvement.
Unless you are the owner of your business, nearly all managers and leaders need some level of approval to take sensible action over people problems in teams. There are risks involved to the company from action, especially it the action is unfair or breaks rules, guidelines or laws. Approval from multiple parties reduces the risk of unfair or illegal actions.
So be clear when you are going to start speaking to your manager to build support for more formal action. Approval from your boss alone increases the pressure for improvement on your problem person.
Always build support from bosses and HR earlier rather than later, if problems persist.
failing to incentivise improvement – The fourth big mistake managers make with difficult employees
9 out of 10 employees want to do a good job. There are very few people that are okay with or enjoy letting down team members and their boss, assuming that they have trusting and positive relationships with both.
The reason team members don’t do a good job is that they have barriers preventing them from improving. If they could improve by themselves, most but not all people would improve, particularly if they are incentivised to improve.
Most people need incentives to put the effort into to improve. Think about the positive rewards you could offer and the negative consequences if they don’t improve.
A manager is in a brilliant position to help team members improve. Managers have two personal barriers to overcome before they can effectively help their team member – the “Threat Response” barrier and the “What When” barrier. Assuming they overcome these barriers, they can then help their team member overcome 4 further barriers being- the expectations barrier, the acceptance barrier, the know how barrier and the will barrier. One or more barriers are always present when you have people problems in a team. For any manager to get significant improvement, they need to overcome each of these barriers in the right order.
The Good News
The good news is once you know exactly what to do, overcoming these barriers is fairly straight forward in 80%+ of cases. You usually get significant improvement in weeks. Most managers have 90%+ of the skills needed but they have never been taught what to do and how to incentivise problematic people to want to improve.
This leads far too many managers resorting to removing individuals from teams because this is a lot better for the manager and business than putting up with the problems BUT is it A LOT MORE COSTLY and time consuming than getting improvement for both the manager, their team and the business.
To learn more about overcoming the 6 barriers preventing improvement and to never again worry about resolving people problems in teams, I recommend you register and attend our free webinar on The Quickest & Best Approach to Remove People Problems from any Team. Click here to register
In Summary
The 4 worst mistakes managers make with difficult employees are:
- Putting up with small problems
- Responding with anger and frustration
- Failing to build support for action
- Failing to incentivise improvement
Most managers have enough of the necessary skills to get improvement in the majority of employees who are falling below expectations – for behaviour or performance.
Don’t make these very costly mistakes discussed today. Do take a look at our webinar on how you overcome these 6 barriers preventing improvement. As soon as you are able to consistently improve the performance of your team regardless of who is in your team, you have a winning lottery ticket. Learning how to manage difficult employees is one of the critical skill sets you need to develop to have an amazing career in management.
If you have any questions on “The 4 worst mistakes managers make with difficult employees”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
For managers to resolve people issues in their team quicky and very effectively, they have to aware of 6 very real barriers to getting improvement AND know how best to overcome each of these barriers. Without this expertise, 90%+ of managers have to resort to the costly and time consuming process of removing the individual and finding a replacement OR put up with the problems. Neither help improve your personal job security or improve team performance in the short term.
Do take a look at our course on How to Manage Difficult Employees for exactly what to do to remove ANY people problems from your team and PREVENT them occurring in the future.
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