Donna Flagg

Problem Employees: There’s Always One...At Least
January 10, 2008

Well, I’m still thinking about the fish in the aquarium. But this time, instead of the schools I pondered in my last entry, two “individuals” are on my mind.   And again, I can’t help but formulate the mimetic scenarios that exist 
between nature and work.

There was a poison toad who was smaller than a golf ball and had enough venom to kill a man (on a good day) and a little white fish who spent most of his time postured in a vertical stance so that he could be on the lookout for threats from above. But let’s remember that he was in the safety of a tank in an aquarium where there were no threats. That didn’t matter though, he looked perpetually worried and sometimes even scared to death that something or someone was out to get him.

It made me think about the effect that that one venomous or overly paranoid person can have on the otherwise healthy synergy of a team. Now of course, we can’t blame the fish. They don’t have egos. They’re only doing what comes naturally to them inside their own habitats.   But people, on the other hand, are a totally different story. They not only have a choice about how they behave, but employees who choose to "misbehave" also have the ability to infect everyone they breathe on if left to their own devises.

So in the case of individual problem-employees, it’s important to treat them as a behavioral problem before they spread their negative contagions into an organizational one. 

The trick is to manage individual personalities while at the same time, shaping the behavior of the organization as a collective.  What makes it hard is not any one component, but the balancing of them all. So communicating expectations needs to be reinforced with feedback; training needs to be evaluated for results on the job; desired performance needs to be rewarded and undesired behavior needs to be managed out. 

Posted by Donna Flagg on January 10, 2008 | Comments (0)