People Behaving Badly

A recent trend is questions from managers about whether they have the right

to "make their people get along,""make someone be nice," or "stop someone from

being a jerk." A participant this month, for example, in one of my management

classes wanted to know if another manager had to "stop being belligerent."

You would think that with unemployment at a record 9%+, people would be

doing their darndest to keep their jobs by being nice to everyone but alas, such is

not the case. What seems to be happening instead is that workers are stressed,

doing more with less both at work and at home and consequently, they're snapping

and snarling at everyone around them.

If you're a manager, what can you do about such ugly behavior?

In a word, plenty. As I wrote in my book,

We Need to Talk: Tough

, there's been so much emphasis in recent years

about employees' rights, managers have lost track of the idea that employees also

have responsibilities. One of them is to work well with others. As a manager, you

need to resist wimping out on this issue. Managers have a right to manage and

there's no way to do so if your team is constantly squabbling because they don't get

along.

Employees also have a responsibility to work well with others. If you have

employees quarrelling like four-year-olds in a sandbox, for example, you can and

should direct

them to learn how to cooperate. As a manager, you can tell all your

difficult employees that they

must get along with others. If they don’t know how,

you can send them to classes, buy them books or CDs, or bring in an expert

facilitator but the bottom line is that cooperation is a mandatory skill in today’s

workplace.

With warring employees, you sometimes just have to lock them in a room

until they figure it out. (Assuming that they don’t have a propensity for violence!)

If you’re going to try this, you should send in a facilitator or other conflict

management expert. What you should

not do is make cooperation and civil

behavior your responsibility when it’s clearly theirs.

Employees may quibble that they don't have to like the people that they

work with or that their coworkers are idiots or incompetent, but they still have to

learn how to work well with them--no matter what they think of their abilities. If

they whine that "working well with others" is not in their job descriptions, you can

simply inform them that "now it is."

Copyright © 2009. No part of this material may be reproduced without written permission from Lynne Eisaguirre,

Workplaces That Work, 303-216-1020, Lynne@Workplacesthatwork.com,

www.workplacesthatwork.com