It felt quite incomplete to me. The viewpoint of this article is that the employee is completely at fault here and had better straighten up and fly straight. Or else.
Don't get me wrong, I have had employees that were getting things wrong, and some of them even fit into these categories. A few did have to be let go. I'm not unfamiliar with uncomfortable conversations.
But not all of them. Maybe 50-60% were recoverable simply by me realising where my leadership wasn't serving, helping, communicating, coaching or thanking them. In other words, I as the leader was the problem, not the employee.
Maybe I'm coming in and only catching the end of a thread. Maybe I didn't understand the long-term conversation that this fits into.
It's worth noting that 99.6% of people (in a recent survey we ran) reported having had a bad boss. Many people who were bosses have reported having no or no effective training.
Bottom line: managers get things wrong too, especially with the stress they shoulder. We owe it to ourselves and our people to make sure we're doing our bit.
Hey Ken — really appreciate this thoughtful comment. I couldn’t agree more with you: Absolutely, sometimes it IS the leader, and not the employee! The intention of this piece is to highlight those situations where an employee is *especially* difficult or toxic to work with, and you as a leader have already done your own self-reflection to how you might be contributing to the behavior.
Most of my other writing focuses on helping a leader uncover these blindspots, so I thought it a helpful change of pace to focus on the other situations (which I agree are likely 50% or less of the time).
Hope that helps to clear things up, and thanks for writing this.
Also! I just re-read my essay, and agree that I could’ve made it much clearer in the beginning that these steps come later, after you as the leader have tried to alleviate how they are complicit in the situation. I’ll take that into consideration for next time. Thank you!
Claire, your articulation of the five difficult employee archetypes is spot on! Each profile reflects real challenges I've faced, and your practical advice is incredibly helpful.
Thank you for sharing such a valuable resource. This guide is now a go-to reference for me in navigating team dynamics. Your insights have made a tangible difference in my approach to leadership.
Unless this article is part of series that already covered it, I think the most important aspects of these types of situations is missing: the systems
Systems are so much more powerful than individuals that it can be hard to remember that they are usually the cause of these kinds of things.
Deming used to say something like "The best person will flounder in a bad system, while the worse person will find success in the best system"
And systems almost always start and are maintained from the top. The cases where that isn't true are actually the worst cases because it means management is even more divorced from reality.
The first question a leader should ask in all of these situations is: "What is my role is creating the conditions for this type of behavior?"
And if they ever think the answer is "None" they're almost definitely wrong. I think leadership is the most likely to be wrong and issues with the work process, since they are the most removed from it. It can be really easy to rely on caricatures of problems rather than the real problems.
It may be that these are really meant to cover the most extreme, but I also think a lot of these "Keys to Understanding" the archetype are cartoonish.
The easiest example is the Victim Mindset. In my experience this is most often caused by the person actually trying to *increase* their influence, not shrink from the needs of the role. Most teams have a person that takes on the thankless job of "cleaner", often because the leader is unable or unwilling to do so. This person takes it upon themselves to solve the problems they see instead of just disassociate and ignore things.
When Marketing is consistently late, it can be easy for the boss to ignore -- in an attempt to maintain focus on what the boss can actually control -- but the "victim", who is used to being blamed (at least in their mind) for the failures of others, starts expending a lot of energy trying to, for example, enforce standards on Marketing so that they can get their work done.
That self-expansion is often not the best way to go about it, but its completely different from the idea that they are looking for excuses. The reality is they are seeing problems and trying to solve them.
When I've realized this, it is often because I've had the "lets look at your job description and what is getting in the way" conversation and had the "victim" stick to their job description, only to have them point out, and history subsequently validate, that a lot of the things they were doing where actually outside their job description but needed to be done.
Often these folks need to be empowered, not told to stay in their box.
Another obvious example is the idea of dictating behavior to the "Brilliant Aggressor". I've never seen anything like telling the rude person to "wait 10 seconds before replying" turn into anything but a performative reaction that just makes things worse: like them pulling out a 10 second clock that they melodramatically start and wait for while everyone waits on them.
In my experience, the "Brilliant Aggressor" is almost always full of it. They're not actually brilliant and that's where the aggressor part comes from. The focus on metrics and things that are easily gamed allows the aggressor to look brilliant, but they know that it's all tenuous and related to their ability to continuing gaming the metrics and on keeping others down. I think the other bullet points in that section do try to get at, but I've found the numbers are usually way more skewed in the direction of destruction of productivity. It's rarely "saved 20%, cost 15%" and usually more like "save 5%, cost 50%". Sometimes the thinking of "have to game the metrics" truly comes from the aggressor's ego, but often it is the (dis)incentive structures put in place my management that lead to this. People that feel safe don't feel the need to game the system. On the other hand, sometimes these people really are just coasting on fraud and are an anchor on the organization.
Overall, the biggest thing for me is that management should always be considering that what they are asking is unreasonable, but that idea isn't seemingly part of the process documented here. Unless you're actually doing the work, you really don't know what you don't know.
Hey Dave – I'm grateful you wrote this. I think it is a very thoughtful note, and I genuinely enjoyed reading it. I'm agree with you, that ultimately, the root cause of every and any dysfunction lies in the system itself. (Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline is the master tome on this.) The leader – and any participant in the system – is, of course, always contributing to the system in some way. And, all participants are beholden to that system as well...
I agree that the system is not fully acknowledged in this piece. At the time of writing this, it was a deliberate choice, as I was looking to focus on extreme edge cases of frustrating behavior that many leaders have asked me about (after they'd deeply self-reflected + troubleshooted many times.) But I realize that choice wasn't made clear in the writing. Furthermore, my lack of discussion on the system itself might cause a leader to assume they are non-complicit in the situation.
Going forward, I will be mindful of that in my writing, and make sure to find better ways to discuss the broader system at large. Thanks for the nudge and inspiration to do so.
Really excellent article. I’ve been in this line of work for 35 years and you’ve done a nice job identifying the archetypes AND offering practical advise. Thanks!
Heya Claire,
Just read this article.
It felt quite incomplete to me. The viewpoint of this article is that the employee is completely at fault here and had better straighten up and fly straight. Or else.
Don't get me wrong, I have had employees that were getting things wrong, and some of them even fit into these categories. A few did have to be let go. I'm not unfamiliar with uncomfortable conversations.
But not all of them. Maybe 50-60% were recoverable simply by me realising where my leadership wasn't serving, helping, communicating, coaching or thanking them. In other words, I as the leader was the problem, not the employee.
Maybe I'm coming in and only catching the end of a thread. Maybe I didn't understand the long-term conversation that this fits into.
It's worth noting that 99.6% of people (in a recent survey we ran) reported having had a bad boss. Many people who were bosses have reported having no or no effective training.
Bottom line: managers get things wrong too, especially with the stress they shoulder. We owe it to ourselves and our people to make sure we're doing our bit.
Hey Ken — really appreciate this thoughtful comment. I couldn’t agree more with you: Absolutely, sometimes it IS the leader, and not the employee! The intention of this piece is to highlight those situations where an employee is *especially* difficult or toxic to work with, and you as a leader have already done your own self-reflection to how you might be contributing to the behavior.
Most of my other writing focuses on helping a leader uncover these blindspots, so I thought it a helpful change of pace to focus on the other situations (which I agree are likely 50% or less of the time).
Hope that helps to clear things up, and thanks for writing this.
Also! I just re-read my essay, and agree that I could’ve made it much clearer in the beginning that these steps come later, after you as the leader have tried to alleviate how they are complicit in the situation. I’ll take that into consideration for next time. Thank you!
Claire, your articulation of the five difficult employee archetypes is spot on! Each profile reflects real challenges I've faced, and your practical advice is incredibly helpful.
Thank you for sharing such a valuable resource. This guide is now a go-to reference for me in navigating team dynamics. Your insights have made a tangible difference in my approach to leadership.
Warm regards, Browny
That means so much to me to read, Brownie. Thank you!
Unless this article is part of series that already covered it, I think the most important aspects of these types of situations is missing: the systems
Systems are so much more powerful than individuals that it can be hard to remember that they are usually the cause of these kinds of things.
Deming used to say something like "The best person will flounder in a bad system, while the worse person will find success in the best system"
And systems almost always start and are maintained from the top. The cases where that isn't true are actually the worst cases because it means management is even more divorced from reality.
The first question a leader should ask in all of these situations is: "What is my role is creating the conditions for this type of behavior?"
And if they ever think the answer is "None" they're almost definitely wrong. I think leadership is the most likely to be wrong and issues with the work process, since they are the most removed from it. It can be really easy to rely on caricatures of problems rather than the real problems.
It may be that these are really meant to cover the most extreme, but I also think a lot of these "Keys to Understanding" the archetype are cartoonish.
The easiest example is the Victim Mindset. In my experience this is most often caused by the person actually trying to *increase* their influence, not shrink from the needs of the role. Most teams have a person that takes on the thankless job of "cleaner", often because the leader is unable or unwilling to do so. This person takes it upon themselves to solve the problems they see instead of just disassociate and ignore things.
When Marketing is consistently late, it can be easy for the boss to ignore -- in an attempt to maintain focus on what the boss can actually control -- but the "victim", who is used to being blamed (at least in their mind) for the failures of others, starts expending a lot of energy trying to, for example, enforce standards on Marketing so that they can get their work done.
That self-expansion is often not the best way to go about it, but its completely different from the idea that they are looking for excuses. The reality is they are seeing problems and trying to solve them.
When I've realized this, it is often because I've had the "lets look at your job description and what is getting in the way" conversation and had the "victim" stick to their job description, only to have them point out, and history subsequently validate, that a lot of the things they were doing where actually outside their job description but needed to be done.
Often these folks need to be empowered, not told to stay in their box.
Another obvious example is the idea of dictating behavior to the "Brilliant Aggressor". I've never seen anything like telling the rude person to "wait 10 seconds before replying" turn into anything but a performative reaction that just makes things worse: like them pulling out a 10 second clock that they melodramatically start and wait for while everyone waits on them.
In my experience, the "Brilliant Aggressor" is almost always full of it. They're not actually brilliant and that's where the aggressor part comes from. The focus on metrics and things that are easily gamed allows the aggressor to look brilliant, but they know that it's all tenuous and related to their ability to continuing gaming the metrics and on keeping others down. I think the other bullet points in that section do try to get at, but I've found the numbers are usually way more skewed in the direction of destruction of productivity. It's rarely "saved 20%, cost 15%" and usually more like "save 5%, cost 50%". Sometimes the thinking of "have to game the metrics" truly comes from the aggressor's ego, but often it is the (dis)incentive structures put in place my management that lead to this. People that feel safe don't feel the need to game the system. On the other hand, sometimes these people really are just coasting on fraud and are an anchor on the organization.
Overall, the biggest thing for me is that management should always be considering that what they are asking is unreasonable, but that idea isn't seemingly part of the process documented here. Unless you're actually doing the work, you really don't know what you don't know.
Hey Dave – I'm grateful you wrote this. I think it is a very thoughtful note, and I genuinely enjoyed reading it. I'm agree with you, that ultimately, the root cause of every and any dysfunction lies in the system itself. (Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline is the master tome on this.) The leader – and any participant in the system – is, of course, always contributing to the system in some way. And, all participants are beholden to that system as well...
I agree that the system is not fully acknowledged in this piece. At the time of writing this, it was a deliberate choice, as I was looking to focus on extreme edge cases of frustrating behavior that many leaders have asked me about (after they'd deeply self-reflected + troubleshooted many times.) But I realize that choice wasn't made clear in the writing. Furthermore, my lack of discussion on the system itself might cause a leader to assume they are non-complicit in the situation.
Going forward, I will be mindful of that in my writing, and make sure to find better ways to discuss the broader system at large. Thanks for the nudge and inspiration to do so.
Really excellent article. I’ve been in this line of work for 35 years and you’ve done a nice job identifying the archetypes AND offering practical advise. Thanks!
So glad it was useful to you, Ellyn!
This is exceptional