Supervising Difficult People

In Supervising Difficult People, you'll learn ...

• When to act on irritable behavior with employees
• What to focus on before counseling an employee about their actions
• How to define their objections properly about an employee’s performance
• Some possible reasons why people may be acting inappropriately

Overview

Preview a portion of this course before purchasing it.

Credit: 5 PDH

Length: 95 pages

A fact of work life for everyone in a supervisory role (this also includes the terms "management" and "leadership") is that at some point, you will have to deal with difficult people. Unfortunately, their behavior is rarely difficult enough that you have reason to terminate them on the spot and be finished with the problem. No, they seem to do just enough to become a constant irritation for you but never enough at once to get rid of them.

Your success as a supervisor depends on your ability to deal with them effectively enough that they do not consume a disproportionate part of your time and impede the productivity of your team while getting them to stop the negative behavior. In short, you cannot allow a minority of employees acting badly to consume the majority of your attention.

No single person, book, or self-development source can supply the key to dealing with every variation of "difficult people" - there are just too many, it would be too big, and few people would read it. Fortunately, a variation of the Pareto Effect ("20% of something accounts for 80% of the events") can be applied here: most of the difficult people you will encounter can be dealt with by understanding a few simple principles. We will present those few simple principles in this course. These are the difficult behavior types we will cover together: The Bully, The Complainer, The Sniper, The Crude Jokester, The Gossip, The Know-It-All, The Indecisive, The Emotionally Fragile, The Unreliable, The Slacker, Brown Nosers, The Phony, The Minimalist (Least I Can Do To Get By), Can’t Say "No", and The Volcano.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

• Determine when to address irritable behavior by employees.
• Identify what to focus on before counseling an employee about the employee’s actions.
• Define concerns about an employee’s performance clearly and appropriately.
• Explain possible reasons why people may behave inappropriately.
• Express performance expectations in clear, measurable terms.
• Distinguish between productive activity and mere busyness among employees.
• Clarify ambiguous performance expectations.
• Develop a useful performance assessment that facilitates performance documentation and improvement in employee behavior.
• Identify the causes of performance problems.
• Explain factors that motivate people.
• Formulate specific questions to ask employees about performance problems.
• Determine whether counseling or coaching is appropriate.
• Apply effective counseling techniques.
• Coach employees toward higher performance effectively.
• Explain how to redirect employees from inappropriate behaviors toward appropriate behaviors.
• Identify the legal relationships among employees, supervisors, and employers.
• Apply effective approaches for dealing with fifteen different types of difficult employees.

Certificate of Completion

You will be able to immediately print a certificate of completion after passing a multiple-choice quiz consisting of 30 questions. PDH credits are not awarded until the course is completed and quiz is passed.