Turn Team Anchors Into Powerful Accelerators With 5 Personal Transformations
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Your worst team member is anchoring team performance. They block all your efforts to improve team performance. IF you want to INCREASE TEAM PERFORMANCE, you have to CHANGE this dynamic in your team.
I know – I have transformed the worst team in a business into one of the best – in multiple different companies and in different sectors. I have won multiple prizes for best team and led teams in household names like innocent drinks through to large corporates like EY and Fosters.
Your worst team member holds back your team and as a result, holds back your reputation, status, bank balance and career progress as a manager!
It doesn’t matter if your worst team member is only a little behind the average of the team … all the way through to a major disruptor of the team or a significant underperformer. They block the team from improving.
Turn Team Anchors Into Powerful Accelerators With 5 Personal Transformations
- Transformation 1 – Transform from feeling passive, out of control and a hostage TO being back in control, proactive and in charge
- Transformation 2 – Transform your dread of conflict … INTO handling them with ease, self-confidence and calm composure
- Transformation 3 – Transform from feeling drained … TO being energised and in control
- Transformation 4 – Transform your team from an environment of unclear expectations INTO a culture of clear accountability
- Transformation 5 – Transform emotional reactivity INTO emotional predictability se, self-confidence and calm composure
Your Feelings Right Now
Your feelings are somewhere between: being a little bit annoyed and frustrated … all the way through to being
- totally exasperated,
- beating your head against a wall;
- suffering bouts of frustration, fear, concern, anxiety, defensiveness, self-doubt, anger, etc
- and worry about possibly being fired yourself
You either don’t know what to do next or you have tried everything you know, and it has not worked. Your situation has not improved or not improved much.
You have a choice.
- You can accept the situation and put up with it and the potential consequences OR
- You can get help and transform your situation and prospects
I was in exactly the same place when I was managing my first truly difficult employee.
I choose to get help. It wasn’t an easy decision. I struggled with the choice for a good week. It became one of the best decisions I ever made. I was also really lucky at the time to have an amazing boss who could really help me. She was my best boss ever. You are very unlikely to have such an amazing boss right now.
This is one of the main reasons I created our How to Manage Difficult Employees course – to give you access to the same advice and help that I got when I really needed it.
Below are 5 powerful personal transformations that I went through, and which made a MASSIVE DIFFERENECE to me! They will be just as transformational for you. These transformations are part of what you will gain from joining the How to Manage Difficult Employees course.
Transformation 1 – Transform from feeling passive, out of control and a hostage TO being back in control, proactive and in charge of your own destiny again
In my first proper management role, I inherited my first real problem person. I was confident. I was happy to have those difficult conversations. I gave a lot of feedback. I asked for change and explained the why behind my requests.
And I got NOTHING back.
I felt like he was laughing at me. He didn’t change. He didn’t improve.
My best boss ever taught me a system to tackle my difficult employee. I went from waking up at 4 in the morning worrying about what I should do … to sleeping soundly, to not worrying at all, to knowing exactly what I needed to do and why. My problem person became no problem at all. I was back in control and on the front foot.
Being told exactly what to do was transformation. I realised I wasn’t getting anywhere, not because I didn’t have the skills but because I wasn’t taking the right INTERDEPENDENT steps needed to get improvement. Doing all the steps, in the right order and in the right way transformed the outcomes I was getting. My problem employee suddenly started paying a lot of attention to me and took me very seriously.
You will get the same transformation when you take all the right steps together.
Transformation 2 – Transform your dread of conflict and tough conversations … INTO handling these with ease, self-confidence and calm composure
43% of 2,700 leaders surveyed said they found giving corrective feedback “stressful and difficult” – i.e. they didn’t do it or didn’t give corrective feedback very often.
I went from having a lot of doubts and self-talk in my head … What if I say the wrong thing? What if they take what I say in the wrong way? What if they get really angry with me and behave or perform even worse? What if….
As soon as I knew how to prepare, what I should talk about, how to construct my feedback and what mindset really made a difference in conversations with my worst employee, three big changes happened
- I was no longer afraid of saying the wrong thing. I felt calmer, more confident and could think clearly in the moment. I came across with a lot more confidence and authority. This created the right conditions for de-escalation. I listened more carefully to them, and they really start listening to me.
- I no longer dreaded giving corrective feedback. It was just another task I needed to do. I was a lot more direct, more honest and clearer in my feedback. What surprised me the most is this actually increased their trust of me, their appreciation and strengthen the relationship between us. As a result, they started improving where before there had been little improvement.
- I gave a LOT MORE feedback. The positive reactions I got from staff told me I was doing it right. It became easy to give more feedback. To my worst employee and the rest of the team.
Impact on The Team
These changes in turn led to a reduction of conflict within the team. All those misunderstanding and unspoken frustrations disappeared. The level of trust and psychological safety within the team increased. The level of communication began to increase. The amount of development increased and the speed at which skills and capability were built throughout the team, increased.
Team performance increased and kept on increasing over time. Great for individuals, the team and for me.
Deliver good quality corrective feedback daily and you will get the same benefits. In The How to Manage Difficult Employees course, there is a whole section on giving corrective feedback. This will help you transform from dreading giving honest corrective feedback to finding it no problem at all and loving the results this gives you.
Transformation 3 – Transform from feeling drained … TO being energised and in control
My worst employee caused problems in the team. This person make more mistakes than others. Caused more disruption than others. Caused more feelings of unfairness. Other team members complained. They got frustrated. Angry. Annoyed.
My time got sucked up trying to calm them down and get them focused back on their work rather than focusing on their colleague. Dealing with all their emotions left me emotionally battered and drained. This went on week after week.
As soon as I was taught how to resolve the problems with my worst employee, I got my energy back. I went from being reactive to being in control. My team no longer felt there was unfairness or anything to complain about. They calmed down. I was no longer being dragged into emotional fire-fighting with my team. I had a ton of time back and a lot more energy to focus on much more positive tasks, activities and projects.
I can’t tell what a relief it was. It made coming into work more enjoyable and fun. The team was a lot happier and so was I.
I really do recommend you learn exactly how to manage your worst employee so they don’t cause problems for the rest of the team and as a result, more problems for you.
Transformation 4 – Transform your team from an environment of unclear expectations INTO a culture of clear accountability
Team members pay a lot of attention to what you do and some attention to what you say. Before I knew what to do with my difficult employee, the team saw my worst employee taking the micky, causing problems for me, making my life difficult AND they didn’t really see any downside for my worst employee from his actions.
I had tried everything I knew, and it wasn’t creating improvement. The message this was sending the rest of the team was – behaving like this is okay. I started to see some of their standards slip. I knew it was a very slippery slope downwards from there. Knowing and seeing this caused me a huge amount of anxiety and stress. I was scared about losing my job.
That change almost overnight when I had been taught what to do. Gone was my nervousness and uncertainty. I was confident, sure of myself, clear in my communication and unafraid to spell out the consequences to my worst team member.
He changed his approach quickly. Gone was all the push back and efforts to make me look silly. The careless mistakes went. Gone were the missed deadlines.
AND MY TEAM NOTICED
They all started to up their game too. They could see the lowest acceptable standard benchmark in the team was rising. My actions demonstrated that I would NOT put up with it any longer.
The confusing expectations were gone. They were replaced with crystal clear expectations, reinforced by my behaviour and actions. The team went from being almost casual to being precise. They made sure they were beating expectations. If felt like the atmosphere in the team when from wild west to being pretty accountable. Other team members were proactively telling me what they had completed and what they were going to work on next. They started to hold each other accountable too.
In the How to Manage Difficult Employees course, I teach you how to really incentivise great standards and behaviours – just like I was taught all those years ago.
Transformation 5 – Transform emotional reactivity INTO emotional predictability
There is nothing worse than feeling like you are being pulled from pillar to post. When you have difficult people or people problems in your team, if you don’t know what to do, you have a rollercoaster of emotions – frustration, fear, concern, anxiety, defensiveness, self-doubt, anger, etc
I had all these emotions when I started speaking to my first difficult employee. He could see these emotions in me – coming out in my non-verbal body language. That gave him the confidence to effectively ignore me. My reactions and emotions were making the situation EVEN WORSE. It became a vicious spiral of uncertainty and psychological insecurity. The emotions on both sides get worse and worse. It was exhausting.
When you have the right mindset and the right approach, you don’t fall into this spiral. You react with confidence and supportive action. This creates psychological safety for the other person and you. Their reactions are positive, rather than negative. You are calm, composed, confidence and certain. This creates emotional predictability for you and your difficult employee.
These are the emotional conditions which encourage change and improvement in your worst employee. You have energy and drive. You no longer feel drained.
Transform emotional reactivity into emotional predictability through knowing exactly what to do in every step in the process.
Get Exactly The SAME Transformations
I have shared with you 5 critical personal transformation I went through when I first really understood what I needed to do to manage and improve my first really bad worst employee.
To experience each of these personal transformations yourself, I invite you to join our How to Manage Difficult Employees course. You get the knowledge of exactly what to do through every step of process. Knowing what to do will transform the success you get in improving your worst employee. The system I teach is so fair and effective, and when implemented well, you are pretty much guaranteed to get significantly increased team performance. Somewhere between 10% to 100%+ depending on your current situation.
After taking the course you will be confident, calm, knowledgeable, certain, predictable in the best way and have zero fear of being held hostage by any team member ever again.
To be certain of getting all these personal transformations, I invite you to join our course – How to Manage Difficult Employees.
