You’re probably familiar with the workshop “How to Deal with Difficult People.” But do you know who often gets sent to that session?
The difficult people!
Now, there are valuable skills that can be learned in that class. But here is what can sometimes happen.
Difficult Dan gets sent to the presentation by his boss, Oblivious Oliver. Two weeks later, Oliver approaches Dan and says, “Look, you were ‘broken,’ so I sent you to that class. You were supposed to get ‘fixed’. You didn’t! What happened?”
The issue here is that Oliver never followed up with Dan to find out what he had learned and to reinforce his new (and better) behavior. So Dan just went back to his familiar ways of doing things.
I recently talked with a utility company CEO about his “Difficult Dan.”
“We’ve tried various things but nothing seems to have a permanent impact on him,” the frustrated and exasperated CEO explained. “Can you train him to work better with his fellow employees?”
I replied, “Most people will only change when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change, otherwise they will do what they have always done, and get what they have always got.”
The CEO told me that Dan was a competent employee who had been on the job for 15 years, but he just couldn’t seem to get along with his fellow linemen for whom he was the crew leader.
So I asked the CEO, “Instead of training, would you allow me to talk with each of the linemen, including Dan, privately one-on-one, to find out what is really doing on?”
He agreed.
I began the private interview with each lineman by stating, “So you are probably wondering why you are meeting with this ‘suit,’ right? Well, let me assure you that I am an expert in the area of employee motivation. Do you know what an ‘expert’ is?”
Rather intimidated, each lineman would usually shake his head, “No.”
“Well,” I replied, “an ‘expert’ is somebody who comes from 45 minutes away. I here came all the way from Columbus – so I must be … brilliant!”
That broke the ice.
We’d both laugh, and the interview would be off and running.
Then here’s what happened:
One lineman was visibly shaken and almost cried when he related his story. He said that he would become anxious every Sunday evening when he was with his wife and children, knowing that he would need to face the crew leader Monday morning. He recently went on vacation with his family and promised himself he would not think about his frustrations with work while he was off. Yet he could not do it. To his credit, this lineman took the time to hand-write for me two pages that listed his concerns with the crew leader.
Another lineman was working with Dan on a line. Somebody had painted a smiley face on a marker ball near the airport. After Dan had spun the ball upside down, a member of the community (whom the lineman said reminded him of Mister Rogers) asked from down below if Dan could kindly spin the ball back to its original position, explaining that the smiley face was a way to welcome people who had just come in from the airport. After Dan refused, he got down from the bucket and began to criticize the community member with a tirade of profanities.
Yet another lineman told the story of working with Dan on a job. A shy Amish girl brought the crew leader a plate of cookies. Dan simply snatched the plate from her and walked away. The girl was devastated and crestfallen. “I felt so bad for her,” the lineman said. “If I had any cash, I would have come down and given it to the girl.”
Finally, a lineman told me, “Working with the crew leader on a daily basis has taken a toll on every lineman and their families. We bring home disgust from having to work under these conditions every day. Management doesn’t seem to care because we get the job done and they don’t need to work with the crew leader more than a half hour each day.”
After I had reported these and other similar findings from the anonymous interviews back to the CEO, he was shocked.
“We had no idea that these kinds of things were happening,” he said. “We would certainly have never allowed Dan to abuse members of the community. Why didn’t the men come to us?”
“Because they were afraid, based on previous actions, that you would do nothing,” I replied. “Or worse yet, that you would ‘shoot the messenger.'”
So this time, the CEO did do something. Armed with these findings, he fired Dan.
Later the CEO told me, “I let Dan go on Friday. On Saturday, we had our annual company picnic. I had never seen morale at the company ever be higher!”
A difficult employee’s actions rarely affect the boss but also usually impact his or her co-workers (and maybe even their spouses and children).
Yes, proper training can improve the skills and abilities of your employees. But your employees (difficult or otherwise) must also be willing to change, learn and grow. And, as the boss, you must know what they learned, so you can reinforce their new knowledge and skills and get a return on the investment of your training dollars.
