Managing Difficult Employees

Difficult employees could be any of stubborn, dismissive or combative employees. In addition, it could be employees with low motivation and dedication towards work. Based on my experiences below are some suggestions in handling these situations.

These employees typically ignore instructions or carry much negative energy around them.  This is different from toxic employees. The difference between difficult and toxic employee is that toxic employee starts to rub off on the team and sinks the team morale whereas a difficult employee is a less threatening problem to the team.

Below are some ways to lead these employees:

  • Change responsibilities: A change in settings can help a person find more happiness at work and thus change their behavior. This is especially true if the responsibilities of a person can be leveraged to utilize their strengths.
    • I used to manage an excellent full stack senior engineer who was very good with UX and presentation but used to struggle with implementing business logic in back end. When he was working on the backend, his productivity was extremely low and if I paired someone else with him, it would frustrate him as he was a senior employee and wanted to have independent responsibility of the work. This resulted in frequent frustrating encounters between him and me. I experimented with changing his responsibilities to align more with front end related design and coding. He was much more productive and happier with that work. Over years, he delivered some excellent UI related work for the company and I established an excellent relationship of mutual trust and respect with him. This could not have occurred if out of frustration I had not chosen to experiment with changing his responsibilities.
    • Humans generally succeed in areas that they are really passionate about. I had a high qualified engineer with a background in programming who also happened to have an MBA and a degree in financial mathematics. He struggled a lot in the backend server development and was very dismissive and stubborn receiving critical feedback during that time. Later I changed his role to work more on financial optimization which he was really passionate about and he produced some amazing work in that position.
  • Create diverse teams: Teams with high diversity work really well. In one of my roles, I worked in a team that had a large number of truly brilliant engineers. These engineers had enough ability to drive large sub chunks of the development efforts single handedly but when they were working together on design and engineering, they were extremely combative, each felt strongly about how they wanted the design to look. In the end, it took much longer to finish the product and the end solution had a compromised design some of which had to be rewritten.  A more appropriate mix for this team was to have engineers with mixed experience – senior, mid & junior.
  • Temporarily overlook: This is especially true where you had a good experience with the person and he or she is going through a hard stage in their life which is affecting their outlook at work and surroundings. Most often these issues are temporary.
  • Appreciate good work: I was running a team where for a prolonged time the effort shifted on a specific engineering effort that involved a subset of the team. During this time a senior engineer who was working on another effort that was important but not the key focus at that time was producing excellent work but I wasn’t paying due attention to his work. My lack of attention to his efforts made him angry where he gradually became combative and started harboring negative energy. The solution was simple: when I started appreciating his work and distributed due focus to his area, he became his old self again. Humans appreciate recognition especially when they are putting in a lot of energy into their work. In scrums it’s best to rotate the order in which people give their status. People who go consistently near the end of the scrum feel lack of appreciation and can loose motivation.
  • Rotate work: People like to learn and grow and usually like change. Every engineering team has to solve mundane work. Continuously giving mundane work to the weaker engineers will certainly frustrate them. Its best to rotate work and distribute opportunities amongst the team. Look out for interesting work outside the team that your engineers can participate in. There is always opportunity for learning and training that can be utilized to help motivate the team.
  • Move jerks out: You may temporarily overlook a bad situation; however, if your feedback and guidance is not enabling them to change in a positive manner and their behavior start to rub on others in the team, then action must be taken to either change the person’s responsibilities or let them go.
  • Give feedback constructively: Construct your critical feedback with facts and impact and with an action plan on how to solve the problem. My experience in providing critical feedback is that its best to have a good listening ear where you should hear the person receiving the feedback. And then sticking to feedback with facts and impact i.e., if the person overlooked code review comments pointing to issues in their design which resulted in an error in the system, then the fact is that the person overlooked comments and impact is the error it caused. The action plan is to modify the process where signoff from reviewers is necessary before deploying code into production and encouraging the employee to become more receptive to feedback.
  • Prepare well before providing critical feedback:  Research indicates that negative feedback sticks 10 times more than positive feedback. Therefore, when providing negative feedback, the manager must spend time to deliberate on the feedback and ideally practice it with a more experienced mentor before providing feedback to the employee.

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