Difficult Employees (and How to Handle Them)

&gt; <i>Remember: Their cultural weight does NOT give them permission to override your actions and efforts as a leader. You don’t want the old corrosive culture of the past to subvert the new positive culture of the present.</i><p>Oh man, how dumb were those people in the bad old days before “you” showed up to save this dump? Good thing things are positive now that “you” are at the wheel, passive-voicing the veterans to death…<p>&gt; <i>&quot;Being passionate about your work is valuable, but emotional stability is also a core job requirement. How can we help you find a more sustainable balance?&quot;</i><p>What’s that old canard, “the beatings will continue until morale improves”?

&gt; Archetype #1: The Entitled Veteran<p>&gt; They&#x27;ve seen initiatives come and go, leaders arrive and depart.<p>Yup, and they may have seen the exact same initiative you&#x27;re trying, in the exact same conditions, multiple times. With the same results.<p>You may want to learn from their experience before becoming failed example +1 for the person replacing your replacement.<p>&gt; Archetype #2: The Passive Resister<p>&gt; Document agreements in real-time.&quot;I&#x27;m noting down what we&#x27;ve agreed to. I&#x27;ll send a quick email after this meeting so we both have the same reference point.&quot;<p>If you&#x27;re not doing it routinely for everything it means most of the meetings you have are just social ones. Not work ones.<p>&gt; Archetype #3: The Brilliant Aggressor<p>I feel like the author is mainly in this category. Their way or the highway.<p>&gt; Archetype #4: The Perpetual Victim<p>&gt; Confirmation bias: They actively collect evidence that supports their narrative of being unfairly treated or blocked by others.<p>The author may never have had to deal with a reluctant &quot;OPS&quot; team. On some projects I ended-up adding 2 weeks to a month for ETA due to having to wait for things like servers or access to be available. Even when tickets were posted at the start of the project.

Well, this was the most terrible, demoralizing, demotivating thing to read on Hacker News in a while.<p>And it&#x27;s taught me a lot as to what a CEO of an organization really thinks about their employees, and why the hell I&#x27;d never want to work at Canopy or a Canopy-using org.<p>Signed, The Guy That&#x27;s All 5 Of These Archetypes<p>PS - type #5? Imagine having to deal with personal crises, week after week, with family care and eldercare and any other problems. I&#x27;m glad my team has my back when I have a &#x27;down&#x27; week on performance when I&#x27;ve had to spend a night picking elderly people off the floor at home. They get some rockstar performance just about any other time I can give it back.

The insights the author makes are genuine, but the approach she has is grating. She assumes she has privileged access to objectively view the social reality. She mentions &quot;real&quot;, &quot;realize&quot;, and &quot;reality&quot; eleven times in the piece.<p>Sociologists have a name for this behavior - reification. It&#x27;s essentially a map-territory mistake between people&#x27;s mental model of how the world works and the reality. They confuse their mental model for reality and work toward progressing it as truth.<p>In this context, she&#x27;s essentially leveraging her power as manager to get folks to agree to her reality. This is definitionally manipulative. I&#x27;d hate to have her as a manager. She probably isn&#x27;t aware she&#x27;s doing it.

The first sentence tells you what you need to know. The leader assumes the worker is making a “web of lies” to get out of responsibility. This leader is trash. You need to listen to your employees and respond to their needs. If deadlines are being missed there is likely something wrong with the company; whether it be resourcing, time expectation from above or even just working conditions.

So almost every comment in this thread so far says this is a horrible article&#x2F;horrible manager&#x2F;just horrible.<p>I disagree. As a manager who has to deal with difficult people sometimes, I enjoyed it. The archetypes are recognisable but there are others.<p>Her recommendations aren&#x27;t quite my style of management but I can see they are coming from a positive place. She is trying to help someone who is difficult find a productive place in the team, and giving them actionable things to take away.<p>Failing that, you move on and fire them of course. What else are you going to do?

To me it seems more like &quot;How to be horrible to everyone&quot; or &quot;How to arm-twist people into becoming &#x27;resources&#x27;&quot; or &quot;What to do when your spanner, er sorry human being, gets uppity.&quot;<p>Normal people are imperfect and instead of trying to kick them in the arse to try and make homogeneous things, one should work out how to use their strengths.<p>Actual problem employees are the ones who don&#x27;t care about the job or other people and nothing works on them.

While the archetype descriptions are spot on, the guidance provided to deal with them, is not great, with an obscene amount of CYA baked in.

This isn&#x27;t about how to handle difficult employees, it&#x27;s about how to polity guide them out the door. And once quit&#x2F;fired you can tell yourself they were a lost cause.<p>Are there any good resources out there about how to actually mange teams, rather than the HR-coded ones? All I really see is either surface level, or buried in a doublespeak I&#x27;m not privy into.

What in the actual hell is this doing here.

Every once in a while I like to read up on what the decision makers are saying about us to one another when they think we&#x27;re not looking. Helps me remember that I need to care about getting as much as possible for me because that&#x27;s what everyone else is doing.

This is a really insightful breakdown of dynamics I recognize from places I&#x27;ve worked. I think the &quot;actions&quot; section is a little....slanted towards one way of managing people but it feels like it comes from an experienced place.

I wanna give the author the benefit of the doubt but its hard to when they chose language like:<p>&gt; Here are the specific steps you can take &quot;as a leader&quot;<p>Feels a bit leaders&#x2F;followers mindset, makes me extremely uncomfortable.<p>While the article contains some level of decent herding cats advice it comes from the perspective of outsourcing the problem into the employee and while that can happen, I am sceptical of the framing.

In this thread: all the difficult employees

This article tells me much more about the author&#x27;s type of character.

Does someone know other or even better resources &#x2F; newsletters on topics like this and want to share?

Shit like this is what turns a manager into an annoying, insufferable pointy-haired boss.<p>It&#x27;s so easy to just archetype everyone and throw it in a blog post for some of that lucrative &quot;thought leader&quot; (cue mega eye-roll) cred.<p>Just stop.

I think what is disappointing about this post is that it seems to be an attempt to categorize human behavior so that you can create a treatment for that behavior to conform that behavior to your personal standard. But people are people, the core function of any leader should be first to understand their goals and values so that they are not challenged when other people express their goals and values. Then it is to figure out how to align everyone&#x27;s goals and values together towards a common goal. It isn&#x27;t to have some formulaic, cog-in-a-machine approach to workers. Especially not technical ones.

when i was young i used to think that employers want smart, creative and innovative person because of capitalism.<p>I found out pretty quick that they want a yes man who always says yes to their superiors ideas and makes their superior look like a hero at every opportunity. There is literally no other secret to working in a corporate.

Now do managers