Managing difficult peple

Case Studies and taking action when dealing with difficult employees

Managers are paid more than the average worker for two reasons. The first is that they generally have a good understanding of the occupation that the people they are managing are performing. Thus, the manager is expected to step in at times and essentially troubleshoot. Secondly, the manager, it is hoped, is a little smarter than the average bear, and able to use those smarts to make decisions that positively affect the bottom line of the business. These decisions are what puts stress on you, and the result of the decision you’ve made is what you’re pay and advancement to the next level are based on. With that said, you should be able to take these scenarios and make an informed, logical decision leading to the betterment of your business.

Scenario one: The know it all who really does knows it all.
I guess just about every company has one of these. If I may stereotype a little: This person has usually been with the company for years and in the same job. They work very hard and have a complete understanding of their job. They may have one other close friend within the business. While he will always get the job done and get it done right he is often a big distraction to his co-workers. Sometimes to the point of driving them out of the department or even out of the company all together.
The first person we’re going to deal with is Jack. Jack has been a quality control inspector with a medium sized Aerospace firm for about 20 years. He does his job very well, never misses a day, and is never late. . In the immediate area where Jack works are three other people. One is Jack’s immediate supervisor, Ned, and the other two are co-workers.   This is a relatively demanding job, but it doesn’t require a great deal of skill. They inspect parts to make sure they meet military specifications. It’s a job that requires attention to detail, and it can be fast paced, but anyone could be trained to do it in a couple of weeks. If something is missed, make no mistake; it’s a big problem.

Jack doesn’t have much of a problem with his supervisor. He does what is expected and more and his supervisor appreciates that. Jack and his supervisor have lunch several times a week and they generally get along quite well. Jack’s co-workers literally hate him. Over the last twenty years the position has been a revolving door of people who have performed quite well but just can’t stand working with Jack. Most of them just quit and find another job. A handful of them will tough it out until they can find another open position within the company. But it doesn’t end there. Other people who work in quality control, just not in inspection, also don’t get along with Jack. It’s not quite as bad because they don’t work with him every day, but every couple of months there is a blow up between Jack and a more distant co-worker. The tension between Jack and his immediate co-workers is palpable. Now the really tough part. What Jack’s supervisor isn’t admitting (and none of upper management is aware of it) is that the welders, and engineers also can’t stand to deal with Jack. Sometimes they will sit on a part for a day or two until Jack is unavailable and have one of the other inspectors examine the part. Ned overlooks this because of Jack’s outstanding performance and reliability. But we have a problem, and it’s a tough one to measure. Is Jack’s outstanding performance able to overcome the cost of a small production slow down? Ned thinks that it is, and thus Jack keeps his job and is protected.

Whether or not Ned is actually right doesn’t really matter. In a situation like this Ned should have been looking not just at the HIHM, Jack, but also at the rest of the department and the business. For twenty years Jack has been a pain in the neck to everyone he’s worked with. He has disrupted the company and driven people out who were potentially better employees Ned has never gotten comfortable enough with a replacement for Jack because immediate co-workers have never lasted more than a year and half.
Jim shows up. Jim is hired as the latest quality inspector to get stuck with Jack. Jokes are made almost immediately about how long this one will last. I remember clearly (this is of course not an amalgam of people but a very specific incident and group of people I worked with) no one really got to know Jim for the first couple of months. He seemed like a nice guy, but he was always right next to Jack and no one wanted to go over there. We would talk occasionally at lunch, or on a break. Eventually everyone, and I mean everyone, starts to really like Jim. He is reliable, hard working, always on time, (just like Jack) and really friendly. So more and more people start stopping by to talk to Jim and give parts to him that normally would have gone to Jack.
I’m sure you can image Jack’s reaction. He’s threatened and needs to do something to drive Jim out. I’d worked at this company for a few years and witnessed a few people come and go and some of the crap Jack put these people through but nothing like Jim was about to experience. Every part Jim inspected was double checked by Jack. This was not normal practice just something that started to happen. Jack starts to take work off of Jim’s table and inspect it himself. Jack starts telling Ned that Jim just isn’t up to the job. It gets so bad that nearly everyone in the company is talking about this ongoing feud. Some are starting to suggest that Jack has finally met his match, and something will be done. Then all hell breaks lose. A part that is inspected by Jim and passed comes back as bad. Jack is all over it. Telling everyone who will listen how hard his job really is, and these things just can’t happen, and something is going to be done about it (insinuating Jim will be fired). Guess what? It turns out that this part was one that Jack had taken off of Jim’s desk and inspected himself.
Ned and Ned’s boss who had also grown to dislike Jim a great deal had a golden opportunity. Jim was a perfect replacement and they could have fired Jack on the spot with just cause. This is how things broke down.

Jack is an exceptional inspector
He has made very few mistakes like this
Jim has been here just over a year and may not be as experienced as Jack.
Jack is a pain in the ass.

So what was the result?
They decided to keep Jack because of his years of service and experience. He was slightly reprimanded, and actually given a few days off without pay. Not because of the mistake but because of his incessant harassing of Jim. A few months later Jim found a better job and left the company.
Was the right decision made? What would you have done?
If I had owned the company this is what I would have done. Fired Jack. There are two reasons that a manager will keep a person like Jack, fear and ego. The fear part is easy to understand. Ned was afraid that Jack’s replacement wouldn’t be as good and would cause Ned stress. I understand this, but a few months or even a year or two of a little more stress on the job would have paid great dividends. You as a manager are paid to take this stress and work it to its end. The ego part, a little more complicated. Managers (myself included) want to believe we’re managing big important projects and people. The reality in this situation was that Jack and Jim were both doing a job a high school dropout could have done quite well with very little training. In the twenty years Jack was working there at least 5 people could have replaced him, been just as reliable, just as efficient and a lot less of a disruption to the company. Jack’s mix of work ethic, skill (in a semi-skilled position), and reliability were in no way enough to compensate for the minor production slow downs he caused, and the turnover in other necessary employees who had to work with him every day.
If you have an employee that reminds you of Jack you need to sit down and have a heart to heart with him and let him know that while his work is impressive his dealings with his co-workers is not. It’s also critically important that you let the employee know that his job is in jeopardy.   He doesn’t have 30 days to correct the situation and then return to his old ways. He needs to fix this problem, begin to get along better with others or he is out.

Scenario two; Managing a high-end top producer who can’t get along with others
            This scenario is much harder to deal with. More than a few factors come in to play and they all most be balanced against each other. This is where you earn the big bucks. A difficult employee and a high producer is a tough situation..
            Our high-end (by high end I’m referring to very skilled position) employee is Linda. Linda is a chemist and is very good at what she does. She is without a doubt the top producer in her department. Like Jack she works very hard and rarely misses a day. She has assisted in developing a few no products that have been profitable for the business. Her hard work has set an example for others in the company. She has also benefited the company by increasing efficiency in her department through better procedures. However, just like Jack she has a real problem getting along with her co-workers. It’s not quite as bad as Jack because she’s much more educated, and by virtue of the high level of talent she works with knows that they have a limit to how hard she can push them, or how much grief they’ll put up with. But make no mistake, she is a problem.   She’s had run ins with everyone in her department at one time or another. Occasionally the personality conflict she generates will cause an employee to leave the company.
            What do we do about Linda? As I mentioned this type of scenario requires you to take a few things into account before we even begin to make a decision. First and foremost is the size of the company and Linda’s contribution to the bottom line. This simple critical decision is almost always made incorrectly. The big company doesn’t want to bother with the hassle of firing her so she stays and erodes morale throughout her department. Little by little she degrades the very performance she was delivering to the point of un-profitability.
The smaller company gets sick of dealing with her and fires her or she has a boss like Jack’s and stays and things get worse. Depending on how small the company is this can be a no-win situation. These things do exist. What I would do is assess her real impact on the situation. If she’s working in a company with 25 people and she’s your only chemist, you have to keep her and put up with it, until you find a suitable replacement. You should talk to her and tell her how valuable she is to the company, and bring up these problems. Don’t make too big a deal out of it. What you’re trying to do is buy yourself some time. If you make her mad and she quits when you’re not ready you could sink the company.   Try and find out what a few of her bigger issues are and try to correct them for her. But keep in the back of your mind you’re always looking for a replacement.
What I’ve done in the past is to first weigh all of the good and bad.
How much money is she really making me?
How much of a disruption, or morale killer is she?
Does it really matter if I fix the problem? This seems like a stupid question but it’s really not. In some small companies a person like Linda really does drive the entire business. If I need to replace the assistants she works with every six months, so be it.
How does she handle the customers she deals with? If she is great with the customers and her personality conflicts are only with other employees, it’s less of a problem.
Is she happy in her job? I’ve made the mistake of overlooking this important issue before and then gotten burned by it. If Linda is unhappy in her job I should assume that at some point she’s going to leave anyway. If I don’t make this assumption, I can rest assured that things will at best only get worse. In other words, if she doesn’t leave, and she doesn’t like her job, she’s just going to become more and more frustrated at dealing with her fellow workers.
How difficult will it be to replace her?
In every management book I’ve read this is the point where you get really frustrated. The author tells you to answer these questions and make a decision. Well my friend, I’ve been in that boat and I’m not going to do that. Because this is so important we’re going to delve a little deeper into this scenario and try and give you some concrete answers.
How much money is she really making me? If Linda started and you had 10 employees, and made $100,000 per year, and now five years later you have 30 employees and make $350,000 a year you probably want to keep Linda. Even if it’s just a hunch that she is largely responsible, go with that hunch. Try and work through the problems, but put firing her way on the back burner. At least until you’ve answered the last question, “How hard will it be to replace her?”
How much of a disruption, or morale killer is she? In a smaller company things are not always as they seem. What may look like a problem with Linda could be more than anything a couple of other employees who have come to the common conclusion that they just don’t like her. When you only have 25 or 30 employees and two or three of them are always complaining about another, the problem is thrown out of perspective. If the two or three that dislike her all work in the same area it gets worse. Let’s say in the Chemical lab that Linda works in there are only 8 people. If three of them have banded together to create a constant drumbeat of complaints then it looks like almost half the employees have a problem with her. You have to get a solid understanding of how deep the problem is. Then you have to combine that with you answers to the third question, “Does it really matter if I fix the problem?”
If Linda is super productive, there isn’t a turnover problem, and she’s not slowing production in other areas as Jack did, the problem can be dealt with by dealing with the complainers. This is also an excellent opportunity to get a production boost out of the department. When you explain to the complainers that you understand their concerns, and you realize Linda can be demanding to deal with, but she is a top performer and allows all of us to make more money, you give a hidden boost to everyone’s efforts. The complainers read into it (correctly) that if anything is going to be done about Linda they have to pick up the pace.
On the opposite end of these two questions, if Linda is causing production slow downs, turnover has become a problem, we have to consider replacing her. The final decision will be based on the answer to the next question.
How is she at dealing with customers?    If she doesn’t deal with customers the decision can be made on other factors. I’ve been in the position where a person like this will deal with the customers and be very good at it. You would think that someone with trouble dealing with co-workers would have even more trouble dealing with customers but this is just not always the case. If Linda has developed a few good relationships with customers you need to weigh what the effect of firing her will have on the company’s relationship with these customers. Will she be able to take them with her to her next job? Will they begin to look for other suppliers?    If Linda has just as bad a relationship with the customers as she does with her co-workers you just about have to fire her. Someone with bad bedside manner with customers will eventually cause that customer to leave.
When I’ve made the decision to ultimately replace the employee I suggest that they are getting so much done they just don’t realize how busy they are and maybe it’s time to hire someone to help them out. The help I’m looking for is actually her replacement but make sure you keep that to yourself and your boss. The mistake I’ve made in this type of scenario is rushing the replacement, and then regretting my decision. Everyone can be replaced but sometimes it can take quite awhile. When you’ve made the decision to fire someone of Linda’s abilities try not to rush it. After weighing in on all of the questions we just outlined set a reasonable timetable to find a replacement. The pressure on the manager in this type of scenario is generally related to cash flow more than anything else. Someone of her level is going to cost you a hefty salary and I know what a pain in the neck that can be. Your best option when hiring someone is to put him or her on a 90-day evaluation. Tell them the business is overloaded and you need some help, but that the position is of critical importance and you need to make sure you get the right person. Then if the first person doesn’t work out you can try another one. You just have to keep in the back of your mind that this temporary cost to replace this person will pay bigger dividends down the road.

Scenario three: Managing someone who drives you crazy but does an acceptable job and makes the company money.
If you’re like every manager I’ve ever met you’re laughing to yourself just a little right now. Who doesn’t have one of these? I don’t think there’s ever been a point in my career where I didn’t have someone like this. They’re not stellar performers but they do the job. Something about them just gets to you. It may be they drop in your office at the wrong time and just start yacking. They may think they are expert on every topic. They may dress funny. Who knows? There’s just something you can’t stand about them. Probably more often than not the person just has a type of personality that doesn’t blend well with yours.
You’ll know you’re on your way to becoming a great manager when you can effectively deal with this type of person. Just let them be who they are and try to get along. This man or woman isn’t hurting the business; they get along ok with others, and are probably making the company money. I know it can be a pride swallowing, torturous journey but you have to pick your battles, and decide which problems are worth focusing on. This is not one of them.
I hired a guy like this once and I figured out after about three weeks I couldn’t stand him. He just got under my skin every time I talked to him. If I hadn’t really needed the help I probably would have made some excuse about how we weren’t really busy enough and I’d have to let him go. But I didn’t. I shut my mouth and nodded and smiled at his inane stories, and tried to keep away from him. After a short time one of my sales people placed him in a six-month assignment. He did a really good job and made me some money. When that assignment was over he was back in the office driving me crazy again. I still put up with it. After a few months I became accustomed to him and was able to tolerate him. He worked for me for three or four years and always did an acceptable job. He wasn’t a top-notch performer or anything more than average but he filled a need and contributed to the bottom line without causing many problems.
The net of it is this. Have a little patience and maturity about yourself and you’ll end up better for it in the long run. Sometimes you really are just baby-sitting. That’s ok, as long as you accept him for his abilities.

Scenario 4; Managing Employees who excel at what they do but want a change
It’s a great pleasure to have an employee who is a master of his job and always exceeds expectations. You can give them any project and not have to worry that it will get done and get done right. You can call on them when another employee can’t quite get something figured out or gets into some other sort of jam. They may have any other mix of positive qualities. They train other employees, are excellent with customers, never complain, etc.
But what happens when they get burned out and come to you looking for a change? In smaller and even medium sized companies this can be a real challenge. Even in the largest of companies no manager wants to lose an employee who is this valuable. You want him in your department making your life easier and your climb up the career ladder quicker. The natural tendency is to throw more money at him and keep the gravy train running. But this will only work for so long.
For scenario four our example employee will be Frank. Frank is a real life case study and probably one of the biggest mistakes I made as a manager. It’s also a mistake I don’t intend to repeat.
Frank is a field network engineer. He visits as many as five different customers every week doing everything from network design and complex network upgrades, to troubleshooting.
To begin, Frank is one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met. His total focus is on getting the job done right and making the customer happy. Frank has an excellent mastery of his job and rarely runs into anything he can’t fix the first time. He is demanding of other employees that work with him but has earned their respect. He is also dependable and has shown that he will stick with the company. In fifteen years he’s worked for three different companies. In the IT field this is relatively amazing in the 1980’s and 90’s. If we get a new customer of any significance Frank is one of the first people I want on site.
One of the downsides to working in the field as an IT person is you are usually going to a customers site because something is wrong. Over five or ten years this begins to wear on you. I’ve often used the metaphor of digging a hole that someone keeps filling up when you go home at night. Because of this Frank is getting burned out. He still does a great job it’s just he wants to do something different.
For six months I put him at a permanently assigned location to manage a small group and lead a large upgrade project. It’s a slight change of pace and buys me a little time. When the project is complete Frank is out in the field again and a little refreshed. But it doesn’t last long. He is asking me more and more often if he can move into sales.
I didn’t know how good a salesman he would be and he was performing so well in his role as a field engineer I didn’t let him move into sales. A few months later he quit to become a salesman at a large IT consulting firm. Today he is one of their top 5 in sales in the entire country.
The lesson is fairly simple. A good employee with a solid work ethic will excel and help your business in just about any role you put them in. If you have the ability to offer lateral movement to an exceptional employee you should make every effort to honor the request. In the end you will end up with just as good an employee but much more motivated. You almost can’t go wrong.

Scenario 5; Managing Very creative but not a people person.
I almost left this scenario out because I think in many companies this is already starting to be handled the right way. The very creative people I’m referring to are artists, graphic designers, computer programmers, designers, sometimes even engineers and scientists fall into this category. The jobs these people do require a great deal of concentration and often a great deal of time. If they want to be left alone, your best bet is to try and find a way to accommodate them.
I visited a company that designed very complex testing software for the automotive and aerospace industry. It was 3:00 in the afternoon and the person taking me on the tour of their building took me to where the programmers worked. It was a huge area with lots and lots of cubicles. There was not a single person there. He explained to me that they were on a new project and worked whenever they wanted. The programmers each had a set amount of work they needed to do and when they did it was up to them. Most of them decided to work when no one else was around. They had to attend a meeting once a week during regular working hours and work normal hours when new projects were being kicked off. Other than that they were largely on their own.

Scenario 6; Just give me the damn ball!

When dealing with Highly Motivated and Highly Intelligent employees we sometimes run across that exceptional employee who just wants to do things his way. They know they’re good at what they do, they know you know it, and they know everyone else knows it. I’m not talking about arrogance, just a real and fundamental confidence in their abilities. Because these people are intelligent they often want to make changes to areas of the company that they don’t really have much control over, or responsibility for. They also have a way of doing things that works well for them, and they would like to make departmental, if not company policy.
Having read this far into the book you’ve probably come to the conclusion that I let my best employees do whatever they want and I stay out of the way. Guilty as charged; but only to a point.
When you’ve become a truly entrepreneurial type of manager dealing with this type of person is one of your biggest challenges. We’ve marginalized those at the bottom so they really don’t take much of our time anymore. Those in the middle are more motivated by seeing the rewards given to those at the top, so they take somewhat less time and energy to manage. Now we’re putting our energies where they should be and we’ve run into something of a brick wall. In a real conundrum the problem actually gets worse, the better we’ve been at doing our job. When you begin to manage HIHMs effectively you can attract and retain more of them. More HIHMs means more people who just want to run with the ball.
At one point several years ago I had about 15 field engineers, four of who were HIHMs of the highest level. I also had an exceptional operations manager, and then hired a director of sales and marketing who was extraordinarily good. So I was stuck with six HIHMs all of whom wanted to run with the ball. This in a company with only about 20 people. To compound matters just a bit more, three of them didn’t like the ideas of the other two. They got along ok they just felt they each had the better plan.
Unless you’re a CEO or running a pretty large department you probably won’t have a problem like this on such a large scale. But if you do, it may take years to play itself out to the end. It did in my case.
Three of the four technical people that wanted the ball had no management experience and really didn’t understand the consequences of what they wanted to implement. Over a period of a few months I was able to work with each of them to show them what went on behind the scenes of the company so to speak. When I did this they began to understand that the company wasn’t just providing technical services to our customers and collecting checks. We had to invoice the customer, collect payment, pay for health insurance, workers compensation, schedule vacations, pay for necessary training, market the business, and the hundreds of other little things that go and make up the operations of the company. I also showed them in detail that each of these things has a cost with it. This cost means that we have to carefully prioritize the things that we do and thus we can’t let all six people run with the ball and make financial decisions that will involve a sizable portion of the companies operating budget.
I know that for most of you this is obvious but that’s one of the reasons you’re a manager. For other employees tunnel vision can sometimes take over and cloud the obvious.
This approach worked very well for all but one of the employees. He thought I was lying to him and just putting money in my mattress at night. Eventually he quit to start his own business. The cold hard fact is, you can’t win them all. This was a guy that wasn’t ever going to believe me until he saw it for himself. He honestly believed that a small company should be able to provide two weeks of training for every employee, meetings twice a week, and a deep organizational chart that allowed people to climb it based on certifications, and years on the job, among quite a few other things that would have drastically cut the profitability of the firm. The last I heard this guy had one employee and didn’t even offer health insurance. I guess some people just have to see things for themselves.
As for the other HIHMs I did my best to offer them more input into how certain things were done but at the same time set some clear boundaries. This strategy worked well because they were able to run with the ball but in narrower lanes. They also developed business and managerial skills in the process and thus became even more valuable employees.
With some people time and the entrepreneurial spirit are going to catch up with you and they will leave to start their own businesses. In my mind this is the only acceptable reason for losing an exceptional employee. You can do your best to minimize the chances by giving them more and more responsibility and flexibility but to reiterate you can’t win them all. When it happens wish them luck, pick up the ball yourself and get back to work.

Scenario 7: Oh no, I’ve hired a nut!
I’m not talking about someone with a drinking problem, a drug problem (all that does lead to nuttiness in some cases) or someone that’s just impossible to get along with. I’m not referring to the eccentric personalities we all run across from time to time. I’m talking about an absolute basket case. When this happens to you get rid of the person immediately. If not you’ll risk not only your business but in some cases your very life.
I’m going to keep this as vague as possible to protect the innocent (namely me!). I referred to this scenario a little in chapter three. Some time ago I opened a branch office several hundred miles away from our corporate offices. I had landed a good-sized contract with a company and the pressure was on to hire people to do the work. This was during the height of the 90’s economic expansion and good people were hard to find. I’d gone to this field office several times to interview perspective employees and was frankly just getting sick of the travel and not making any headway. The last time I went up with my manager of services and interviewed one last guy I was determined to hire. He had a decent resume’ and was professional and courteous over the phone. When we met with him he presented himself very well. He answered our questions and said all the right things. Near the end of the interview he asked when we would be making a decision and what his chances were. I felt the interview went fairly well but wanted to talk with his direct manager privately first so I told him his chances were really good and we’d get back with him in just a few days.
This is where it got just a little weird. The guy tells us he can’t wait to get out of the company he’s working for now and tell his boss a think or two. I was a little taken aback. I can understand someone not getting along with his boss it happens all the time. But to say that in an interview was a little less than brilliant. The funny thing is, that comment saved me from making a huge mistake.
When we walked out of the office to head home the guy with me said “Well he seems like a bit of a dip-shit but I don’t know what choice we have right now.”
We decided to give him a chance but we added a little something. We insisted that he come to Cincinnati and work for a week or two before his assignment started. I told him we were busy and needed the help but we really just wanted to get to know him a little better.
Time was of the essence so I had him start on a Thursday. I figured he could work Thursday and Friday and then all of the next week before his assignment started and I could make the decision then as to where to put him in the food chain in the remote office.
Friday late in the afternoon I called a meeting to talk with some of the guys who had worked with him so I could try and get a quick read on the situation. One of the guys who worked with was David. (Again, not his real name). David is one of these really smart guys who gets along with everyone. He’s got long hair and plays the drums in a band when he’s not working so we called him the hippy. David is also one of those guys that just tells it like it is.
I asked him what he thought of the new guy. “Well he’s technical skills are acceptable but not great, and thinks he knows more than he knows.” “Other than that I think he’s great because he’ll bring us more business by spreading viruses around to our customers.”
I laughed thinking David was just being sarcastic. I stopped laughing when David’s expression didn’t change at all. It turns out this guy had told David that he had done some free-lance work for a customer once and didn’t get paid. So in retaliation he put a virus on the customers network.
Normally I don’t fire people. I let the direct manager or the business manager do it. First and foremost I don’t like doing it. Secondly, no one wants to get fired by the president of the company. When you do that you don’t leave them the option of going up the ladder to plead your case, and it’s just demeaning to the employee. If I fire a person personally it’s usually because we don’t have the work or something else out of their control. In this case I made an exception. I left the meeting and waited in the office until I knew the guy would be home then called him. I also never fire people over the phone, but I made an exception on this as well. Someone who will do something like this has to be dealt with right now. This kind of behavior can sink even the biggest company in a big hurry.
So now you’re thinking “Well spreading a virus is of course an offense that calls for firing someone but doesn’t necessarily make him a nut.”
You are correct. What made him a nut was yet to come. After two days of work, and telling a co-worker he spread viruses the guy sues me for unemployment. At this point I don’t think I’d fired anyone for lack of work and so no one had ever collected unemployment as a result of working for us. So I didn’t think our rates wouldn’t go up but I contested anyway. This kind of thing goes on to often. People let the bad guys get away with. A phone hearing was scheduled for a couple of weeks out. In the interim the guy plants a bomb in his wife’s car almost killing her. Now if that doesn’t rise to the level of nut, I don’t know what does. When you encounter someone with a serious character flaw, get rid of him. God only knows how bad it could get if you keep him around. And it’s much easier to deal with something like this when you have control over the situation.

Back to beginning of entrepreneurial mangement and motivation.