Managing People Who Are Hard to Manage
In the documentary movie Buck, there’s a memorable line from Betsy Shirley, foster mother of Buck Brannaman, the real-life inspiration for the movie The Horse Whisperer. Betsy raised more than twenty children, resulting in a household that was at times, shall we say, chaotic. “Blessed are the flexible,” she says with the conviction of one who knows, “for they shall not get bent out of shape.”
In fact, this sentiment applies to management just as well as to child rearing. Managing challenging employees productively requires patience, intuition, and above all, flexibility—attributes many Type B managers possess.
Management would be the best job in the world, or at least one of the easiest, if all employees were highly motivated, unfailingly polite, always had a positive mindset, and were terrific collaborators. But of course they’re not.
It can be a particularly challenging aspect of the role for some Type A managers—likely highly motivated and disciplined themselves—to find the flexibility and patience to bring out the best in employees who may be so different from them. Perhaps the employees aren’t too motivated, or are not really sure what they want to be doing in life, or lack a sense of urgency and commitment. Or maybe they’re very bright and motivated—but also moody and stubborn. Or perhaps they don’t collaborate well with others—or they collaborate too well and are chatty and easily distracted. I could go on (and on), but you get the point. And the fact is, they’re employed by your organization—perhaps you hired them yourself—and presumably they do have the skills that enable them to do the tasks the job requires. (If they don’t have the skills, then you’ll be called on to let them go.)
Similarly, it can be challenging for Type B’s to deal with the frustration, the confrontation, the need to stay right on top of a situation that needs staying on top of—when the natural inclination might be to take a hands-off que sera, sera approach and let things slowly resolve themselves over time. Unfortunately, when you’re managing difficult employees and your own boss wants progress and results, unlimited time is a luxury you don’t have. After all, business is business. And management—getting productive work out of others even if they’re difficult—is what you’re being paid for. This is where flexibility, being willing to view challenging situations in unexpected ways and course-correct when needed, will help Type B’s with one of the toughest parts of the job.
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I often felt this aspect of management was a variant of the old “80-20 rule” in business, in which 80 percent of your business is said to come from 20 percent of your customers. But when I was a manager, rather than 80 percent of my business coming from 20 percent of my customers, it felt like 80 percent of my time was spent on 20 percent of my (most challenging) employees. In this chapter we’ll offer suggestions for working with various types of challenging personalities, including creative individuals and the growing army of employees with ADD/ADHD. And we’ll start by providing ideas for managing employees who are talented, but plain old hard to manage:
Be thoughtful about assignments. To the extent possible, and naturally this isn’t always controllable, depending on the nature of the work, try to match assignments well with interests and abilities. For difficult employees who are also quite talented—just difficult to work with!—try to provide especially substantive assignments that will utilize and stretch their considerable skills. “We give our best people the worst assignments” was how a colleague of mine used to jokingly put it. You may find that a well-chosen assignment can engage them and will bring out their best. An employee who’s fully engrossed in a project is much less likely to go off track.
Make HR an ally. Despite Hollywood’s tendency to humorously stereotype the meddling, bureaucratic Human Resources manager (and personally I thoroughly enjoyed Toby’s portrayal on The Office), the fact is, when dealing with problem employees, HR can be an invaluable resource. They provide added perspective and (no small matter!) keep both you and the company out of trouble. Many sizable HR departments have specialists dedicated to helping managers handle serious employee relations problems. Don’t hesitate for a moment to enlist their services if you feel you need to.
Be clear about your expectations, and what can and can’t be tolerated. Confronted by any number of irritants—malingering, carping, gossiping, tardiness, interpersonal conflicts, work not turned in on time, or work of poor or mediocre quality—you need to make it completely clear what levels of work and behavior are expected, and what will and won’t be tolerated. Clear annual performance objectives (see Chapter 10), coupled with ample real-time feedback when issues arise, are the managerial tools of choice.
Be clear about articulating pain points. Don’t dance around problems—articulate the issues as precisely as possible. If there’s difficulty, for example, with a certain member of your Badger Team collaborating constructively with members of the Grasshopper Team, state it. If an employee has problems delivering projects on deadline, state it. If a manager who reports to you is so demanding that he or she is burning out staff and causing too much turnover, state it. Then work with the individual in question to shape these current problems into future performance objectives.
Give ample feedback in both directions. Don’t wait until midyear or end-of-year evaluations for feedback. Provide feedback often and in all directions—positive reinforcement when things are going well and corrective guidance when they’re not. There’s no way to course-correct if it’s not clear that correction is needed—and naturally there’s a difference between useful, insightful feedback and pesky micromanagement.
Don’t feed drama. When conflicts arise, as they inevitably do, stay calm. Some challenging employees enjoy being provocateurs. Don’t allow yourself to be drawn into the fray and pull rank and lose your temper, however tempting that might be. Prepare for a potentially volatile meeting by gaining tight control of your emotions going in. As the manager, you’re the voice of authority and reason—maintain the moral high ground at all times. Remember, this is business, not a personal dispute—do your best to drain the emotion out of it.
Document clearly. As discussed in Chapter 16, on managing conflict, thorough documentation is a cornerstone of sound management. It provides necessary objective data when there are ongoing employee problems. Such documentation needn’t be lengthy—a quick paragraph will do. It just needs to summarize clearly and concisely the issues that have occurred and why they’re problematic. This data will later become extremely helpful for clear, fact-based evaluations, assessing objectively whether an employee’s goals have been achieved or not. And it’s essential should you need to build a case for an employee’s termination.
Try to see things through the eyes of others. This is a circumstance where Type B flexibility and intuition serve you well. No one’s perfect; all of us of course have faults. It’s possible some of the fault in a fractured relationship with an employee is yours. Might there be something in your management style that’s causing an employee to relate to you in persistently frustrating ways? Could such perceptions be valid? Occasional looks in the managerial mirror are always worthwhile—and often illuminating.
Recognize when it’s time for up or out. A risk for many Type B managers—who naturally try to get along with others—is a tendency to put up with too much for too long. Unfortunately, persistent problems with employees rarely resolve themselves. At some point “enough is enough” and certain employees need to be managed, as the saying goes, “up or out.” If a difficult situation has become chronic, with little sign of improvement, and it’s consuming vast quantities of your limited managerial time, you may be at this point. At such times either employees raise their performance up or they find themselves out, looking elsewhere for work.
Know when to say when. When you know beyond a doubt that “up” isn’t happening and “out” is, work closely with HR to follow all proper termination procedures. Then, as Nike would say, just do it. Make the move and move on. (See Chapter 17, on accountability, for more on letting employees go effectively.) Indecision erodes authority when firm action is needed. If a termination is capricious, it sends chills through an organization (“This could happen to anyone or, worse yet, me!”). But if a termination is unquestionably deserved, a manager will in all likelihood be respected for doing what needed to be done. Other employees usually know better than managers exactly what’s going on in the trenches—who’s a workhorse and who’s a show horse—and problematic employees disturb far more than just their manager.
We’ll turn now to an intriguing subset of the “difficult” employee population: creative individuals. Managing creative people isn’t “hard” in the same way as managing the employees we’ve just been discussing—employees who are, say, unmotivated, oppositional, or stubborn—but it’s challenging in that it takes an entirely different managerial mindset. And though I’ll use some examples here based on my experience with advertising agencies, an unusually creative subset of the population, the fact is, managers will find creative individuals everywhere—from accounting to customer service to manufacturing to you name it—not just in classically “creative” environments such as advertising and marketing. Again, all of these are circumstances where Type B flexibility and intuition will serve you well.
One other key fact about creative types? No matter the nature of your business, creative employees can be extraordinarily valuable to you and your organization. They can come up with unexpected, brilliant solutions to intractable problems.
As the former head of national advertising for a Fortune 500 company (MassMutual Financial Group), I can tell you that over the years I had the privilege of managing many very creative people. I spent considerable time working with copywriters, art directors, TV commercial producers, directors, photographers, and designers, among others. It was both frustrating and rewarding, but mostly the latter. While creative individuals can be famously difficult—moody, introspective, overly sensitive, and so forth—they tend to be difficult in a very different way from the broader employee population. As a rule, they’re also very motivated—highly invested in the artistic and creative challenges of the project at hand. So what does this mean for you as a manager?
Tell them what you want done, not how to do it. This is no place at all for a Type A manager to be overly controlling or autocratic. This highly creative portion of the population, more than any other, doesn’t respond well to micromanagement or overly tight control. Client-imposed solutions are almost never optimal, and a heavy-handed approach seldom gets you where you want to go. It just breeds resentment. Better to provide a clear strategic road map (in the advertising business, for example, it would be called a “creative brief,” a project overview developed by the ad agency with ample client input) and then let your creative employees figure out the best way to travel that road. They’ll do a far better job themselves than would a less creative businessperson—like me—dictating a solution.
Lead with firm direction and a light touch. As a corporate executive I sometimes joked (mostly to myself—I didn’t want to give anyone ideas!) that I could be flogged repeatedly so long as I was well compensated. Not so with highly creative individuals. Flogging—or even other, gentler means of corporate persuasion—is ineffective here. Creative people shut down under such circumstances, turn resentful, don’t give their best effort. On the other hand, since creative teams often care deeply about the projects they work on, whether it’s a new TV commercial or an “insane” new mobile device, you want to use that emotional investment to your advantage. In short, this is an excellent place for calm, thoughtful, strategic Type B guidance—plus praise is always welcome as a motivated team searches for the optimal solution. Creative teams respond well to suggestions, coaching, and encouragement so long as those suggestions are thoughtful and offered for consideration, not imposed. The one caveat here is that, whatever your business, this is never “art for art’s sake,” but art for commerce’s sake. When a project is going off the strategic track—very cool but straying from your fundamental business objectives—it needs to be reined in. I was inclined to offer my creative teams a long leash but pull it in quickly when needed.
Don’t just trust your own instincts and taste. The best example I can give of this involves a story about a TV commercial that almost never saw the light of day. An ad agency I was working with back in 2001 presented, as part of a new round of work, a rough draft of a proposed new TV commercial featuring a frog, a hot pink background, and loud, pulsating music by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. I felt confident in my knowledge of the types of commercials that would work for a 150-year-old, appropriately conservative insurance company, and the way our customers would respond to them. So I did what I felt any rational advertising manager would: I killed the spot.
The only hitch was that we were about to leave for focus groups across the country, and at the last minute the agency’s creative director asked me, would I really mind, as a favor to the creative team, if during the upcoming research we kept that crazy frog commercial in the testing mix. I could see that the creative team had affection for the spot, and there was no harm in doing a little extra research on it.
Over the next few days we conducted multiple focus groups with members of the company’s target audience. The commercial in question, “No Prince Charming Required,” showing the wild unpredictability of life (and therefore the need for life insurance) for a woman who never needed to kiss a frog, didn’t just test well: It obliterated the competition. Women were inspired by it and men found it compelling. We ended up running it nationally for years, and it became the most successful TV commercial in the company’s history, as well as the foundation for numerous seminars and marketing programs.
In the end, I was delighted my creative team hadn’t listened to me. What did I know? I may not have been smart—but at least I was flexible. I listened carefully to people who had deeper experience in the field than I had, and then, even more importantly, I listened to our customers as well.
Last but not least in this densely populated Land of Challenge, we’ll focus on those who have trouble focusing. If you’ve been in management for a reasonable length of time, it’s a safe bet that at some point in your career you’ve found yourself frustrated by a talented employee who was undermined by seemingly inexplicable but persistent behavioral issues. It’s also possible there’s a specific reason for it. He or she may have ADD/ADHD.
This issue was first brought to my attention several years ago when I posted an article on Forbes.com on the particular challenges of managing difficult but very bright individuals. Several readers quickly contacted me and noted that the kinds of issues I was describing sounded as though they could well be related to ADD/ADHD (we’ll get to clinical definitions in a moment).
In the busy context of normal day-to-day management, ADD/ADHD as a possible explanation for frustrating employee problems is an easy issue to overlook. I can speak from considerable personal experience on this one. Even as a Type B manager with a predisposition toward introspection and psychological approaches, while I was in management I never considered ADD/ADHD as an answer to puzzling employee challenges I faced.
But the more I researched the topic as Forbes readers contacted me, the more I was surprised to learn that despite the vast amount written about symptoms and treatment of ADD/ADHD, relatively little information was available about the implications of the condition for management. And the more I thought back on employees I’d managed over the years, as well as my own chronic disorganization, the more I realized I’d missed a multitude of clear signs. If many employees who have this condition have the potential to be highly productive but can be sabotaged by their own behavioral tendencies, what can you as a manager do to help these individuals succeed and be as productive as possible?
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Let’s first review some definitions and the problem’s scope. ADD (attention deficit disorder) and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are terms for a developmental disorder characterized by distractibility, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. ADHD is currently the clinically preferred name, though ADD is also commonly used. According to the American Deficit Disorder Association, approximately 4 to 6 percent of the U.S. population has ADHD. Even more concerning for the future management landscape is that at some point in their development, nearly one in five U.S. high school boys has been given an ADD/ADHD diagnosis, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—a formidable number that will soon be entering the workforce. And the condition isn’t confined to the United States—it occurs worldwide. It’s not just a disorder of attention; it affects impulse control, time-management skills, and goal orientation—all of which have negative implications for work-related performance. However, with awareness of the symptoms and issues that commonly result, plus some Type B flexibility and patience in working with these employees, there are clear tactical steps you can take to mitigate problems and help these individuals perform up to their potential.
How is ADD/ADHD often exhibited in a workplace setting? Since the condition involves a person’s ability to become easily distracted and disorganized, it can cause difficulties in a structured, deadline-oriented workplace. (As the very words imply, a disorganized person will readily find challenges in an organization.) Simply put, it’s easy for such employees to go “off track.” That’s when you need to get them back on track by focusing on specific areas:
Time management. ADD/ADHD has a clear impact on time-management skills. Becoming easily distracted can interfere with the timely completion of tasks, and there’s a tendency for people with ADD/ADHD to underestimate how long tasks will take. Thus, more frequent check-ins from managers, or computer-based reminders, for example, can help keep projects moving at the desired pace.
Office configurations. Because of the ease of distractibility for these individuals, open office arrangements with few walls or dividers to filter out conversations and other noises may lead to problems. To the extent practical within your own particular business setting, more privacy and quiet are helpful to keep someone with ADD/ADHD focused and on track. Again, management flexibility—as opposed to “this is the way we’ve always done it here”—can make a positive difference.
Reward systems. Since these employees’ attention easily wanders—the essence of the condition—a manager may want to use rewards, either tangible or simply verbal, more frequently than normal. Even small rewards can have a positive motivational impact, and can help employees with ADD/ADHD stay focused during lengthy projects.
Team dynamics. Effective collaboration, as we know, is always a valued attribute in the business world. Individuals with ADD/ADHD are generally active, lively talkers—but even too much of a good thing can be a problem—and excessive chatting or socializing can lead themselves (and others) off-task and prove disruptive to team activities. Though there are of course exceptions, employees with ADD/ADHD tend to be more effective in individual contributor rather than team leader roles. It also makes good sense when working with these people to give especially careful thought to a team’s composition, and to be cognizant of ongoing interactions among team members.
Closer supervision. One broad implication for managers of employees with ADD/ADHD is the need for somewhat closer supervision than you’d normally provide—to help ensure that projects stay on the right course in the right time frame and that the needed results are achieved. To the extent possible, you’ll want to be thoughtful about how assignments are made, bearing in mind the particular strengths and weaknesses of the individual.
In short, an intuitive Type B approach can be more effective than a “my way or the highway” style when dealing with these notuncommon issues.
It should be noted of course that it may not be immediately apparent whether an employee has ADD/ADHD. This may or may not be information an employee chooses to share with a manager. However, this section and the suggestions in it are meant to be food for thought about a growing problem; they may stimulate conversations and ideas for management strategies. You should also be aware that certain medications can be very effective at normalizing ADD/ADHD symptoms, though this is naturally a matter for physicians and their patients to discuss.1
One final point that is worth emphasizing: Over the years some of my most chronically disorganized employees were also among my most creative and talented.
They were extraordinarily valuable to our organization.
Management Insight
Effectively handling all kinds of difficult personalities is unquestionably one of the most demanding aspects of management. Maintaining a flexible, intuitive approach, both strengths of Type B individuals, is a constructive way to address this challenge that all managers face.