Dealing with Passive Aggressive Employees

A manager recently asked me to suggest more effective communication tactics for dealing with his “passive aggressive” employees. You might find my response to him helpful as well…

By tagging a colleague as “passive-aggressive” –– a term that sounds clinical and diagnostic  –– you have significantly categorized this person. Your intention may be to describe behavior but you labeled the person.

In so doing, you trapped him or her into a pre-conceived and restrictive set of expectations. This limits your options for successful interactions. It reduces the likelihood that the situation will improve even if you were to deploy new management tactics or communication techniques. 

Think of it this way: Say, for example, that in my own mind I label you as an uncooperative jerk. But then I go searching for a better “solution” to communicating with you. Well, just how successful are those techniques likely to be in improving my getting what I want from you? No matter what techniques I use, I’m always trying to implement them with an uncooperative jerk! 

Not surprisingly, if I continue to see you as an uncooperative jerk, in some way you’re going to continue to be one –– because that’s how I perceive you. How much progress could you realistically expect to make with a jerk \ difficult person \ passive-aggressive employee?

A far more effective method for improving your situation follows.

A Method that Does Work

Above all, recognize that you and the employees that you perceive as “passive aggressive” (or difficult, or uncooperative, or whatever) are in a relationship. If you want the actions of individuals to change, you need to converse with each person about precisely what you want, and how you are seeing their current actions. And you need to listen to their perspective on the matter.

Here is a highly effective process that will help you improve the accountability of your workplace through communication that is direct, candid, and respectful of all involved.

1. Declare clear expectations and goals (outcomes, deliverables, deadlines, budgets) for your work group generally and for each of your employees specifically. Many times, apparently “passive aggressive” or uncooperative employees are not doing what the boss thinks they should because they just aren’t sure what is expected of them. 

2. Make specific, clear requests of each individual for the tasks you want them to accomplish. Through conversation, make sure that your employees know what is expected of them. Apparently “passive aggressive” or “uncooperative” employees are  confused by mixed or competing signals in their workplace, not exhibiting defective work attitudes. 

3. Obtain clear agreements from each employee for what you expect from him or her. Be certain that each person understands what you want.  I have seen many bosses issue orders essentially in a vacuum. This one-way communication is often through routine emails, or pontifications at meetings, or one-sided decrees in passing remarks.  The boss considers an edict “from on high,” but no one else perceived it that way. Then the boss wonders why the employees are so lazy, irresponsible, uncommitted, and on and on.

4. Ask for specific commitments from each employee. Again, in two-way conversation between colleagues, ask your colleague directly: “Will you have that to me by Tuesday at noon?” Such a question requires a commitment in response. It is a world of difference from merely saying (or barking) to your associate, “I need that no later than noon, Tuesday!” A commitment is a promise. You are asking your employee for a promise to do what you have asked him or her to do. 

5. Stay in conversation with your colleagues. Keep the conversation going. Enquire: How’s it going? What do you need? What successes are you having? What challenges are you having? How can I help? How is it looking for meeting the deadline \ budget? 

6. Follow the process with accountability conversations. Accountability is not punitive! It means to take an account of what happened: it can be very positive! For example, when the Tuesday deadline in our example arrives, and your colleague delivers ahead of schedule, you have another conversation: Thanking her for her initiative and follow-through. Conversely, if the appointed hour arrives but the work does not, it’s time for an accountability conversation where you learn what is going on –– what accounts for the work not being delivered as promised. 

The key to a successful accountability conversation in a case where the promise was not fulfilled: An open mind with an earnest willingness to learn.

If you find that your associate has a reasonable explanation for not delivering as promised, try to discover what you can do together to improve conditions to increase the likelihood of his or her succeeding consistently going forward. Perhaps you need to change something: How you give instructions, the lead time on the requests, the tools or information you provide…

On the other hand, if you find that the same person is failing to make good on his promises to you –– and you are faithfully following all the steps of this process –– you may have someone who is in the wrong job; perhaps he or she is not suited for, or not willing to assume, the responsibilities of the position. That would make your challenge not so a communication process matter so much as a fit-to-the-position issue that the two of you will need to discuss candidly. 

Attitude and Life

Attitude and perspective as much as circumstance determine our “reality.” Consider the case of a banker whose small town building and loan was facing its own foreclosure over the holidays.

The banker was under investigation for suspicion of mismanagement when thousands in bank funds went missing. The missing money, apparently stolen, if not recovered immediately would bankrupt the bank and force its immediate closure by bank examiners.

As he arrives home on Christmas Eve, after a day of dodging the bank auditor, the banker is exhausted, frustrated. He is scared out of his wits. He faces not only the threat of bank examiners closing the community bank that his father and uncle founded a generation earlier, but personal and perhaps even criminal liability as well.

The banker’s nerves are frayed; rubbed raw. As he enters his home, his daughter is practicing a simple carol on the piano in preparation for her Christmas recital. “Must you keep playing that silly song over and over and over again?!”, the banker, George Bailey, snaps.

His sons want a little of his attention. In a fit, George demands to be left alone. He throws himself into a chair. He slumps. He sulks, broods. Mulling his desperate, hopeless situation, he boils over. Despite gentle, sympathetic inquiries from his wife, George storms out of his house in a huff. He drives off into a blizzard.

After crashing his car into a tree, he contemplates suicide. Then, with angelic intervention, George Bailey experiences the dark hole that would be left in the world had he never been born. Seeing the difference he’s made, George comes to appreciate his imperfect but meaningful life. His mood shifts dramatically.

George Bailey returns home in a state of ecstasy. The grim bank examiner is standing in the Bailey home’s foyer. George enthusiastically greets the dour man with a kiss, and exclaims, “Ready to take me to jail? Yipee!”

George practically tackles his children and wife as he tightly embraces and lavishes affection upon them.

At the moment when George Bailey returns home, in Frank Capra’s holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life, what exactly in his circumstances had changed?

Abolutely nothing, of course, save for his outlook on his situation. George Bailey only shifted his perspective and renewed his appreciation for the totality of his life.

As the movie about George Bailey draws to a close, the town’s people rallied to bail George out of his precarious predicament with their generous cash donations. They eagerly replaced the $8,000 that mean, grinchy Old Man Potter secretly snatched from George’s absent-minded Uncle Billy.

Real life doesn’t always come with saccharine Hollywood endings, of course. At times, life can be an arduous, painful struggle. However, through all life’s twists and turns, perspective and the emphasis that you give life’s many facets always remain vitally important choices.

The attitude you bring to your circumstances, in turn, affect them. Attitude and life’s circumstances exist in a relationship. You always have a choice about the one and it always affects the other.

Why a Leader's Political Responsibilities Matter So Much

“Politics” often gets used as a pejorative. The word gets misused, and in most cultures the political function is vitally important. Here’s why.

Essentially, you can divide a society’s work into three domains:

1. Practical
2. Moral
3. Political

The Practical domain is where things get done. Most people spend their lives there. The Moral domain is where judgments about practical matters are made. Theologians, intellectuals, and pundits ply the moral domain. Finally, the Political domain is where policy is made: rules, regulations and laws governing how all of us should act.

Policy represents the domain that’s the most complex, of the highest order. This is because Policy — when it is done well — integrates the concerns of both the Practical and the Moral.

The relationships between the three domains account for why, culturally, we accord more status to Senators who debate policy and pass laws, than scientists who discover how things work, or commentators who tell us how to judge how well things are working. 

People operating in the policy domain — leaders — carry high expectations and responsibilities that go with the power of their offices. A leader’s political power blends the practical and the moral. It is a formidable responsibility, and a special trust placed in leaders who hold positions of power that nearly everyone recognizes. 

A wise leader knows that a position of responsibility is not only about delivering results in the practical domain. That is but one-third of the equation.

Three Questions: What Is, Works, Right?

In considering a course of action, a leader should ask three critical questions:

1. What is? (the state of affairs, the best available information)
2. What’s right? (what is the most fair; does the greatest good, the least harm; is the most sustainable; has the longest lasting, greatest contribution for the greater good)
3. What works? (the most expedient, efficient, utilitarian solutions known to the challenges at hand)

Busy business people frequently fixate on Question #3, What works. Often it is their training and the orientation from which they have derived their rewards. It is also, usually, the easiest to answer. 

Technocrats can spend minimal levels of time on Questions 1 and 3. Leaders of character will spend more time ––and personal and political capital — on Question 2, pondering, even agonizing over what is right. 

What works does not matter if it is not right. 

Generational Differences in the Workplace

A colleague recently asked for help in preparing a seminar on how to circumvent the “generational differences” in the workplace.

In bold terms, I suggested she reframe the assignment:

Highlighting “generational differences” — even when highlighting presumed strengths, might be thought of as: Identifying stereotypes.

How much broader a brush could we paint with than to suggest an entire generation thinks or acts alike? 

How about a seminar highlighting differences between co-workers of varying ethnic origin? Or typifying by the strengths of various religious beliefs? Or political persuasions?

If those aren’t appealing, why would highlighting age differences — and presumed related attitudes and behaviors — make for good workplace relationship training? 

If we generalize as though every member of an entire generation holds attitudes identical to our “category description,” and then we teach others to treat them as though they do, how fair is that to those persons who do not have those expected attitudes? Haven’t we just made unique individuals targets of group prejudice? 

Yes, to be clear, I’m suggesting that by definition: A seminar on “generational differences” teaches stereotypes and prejudices.

Wouldn’t a focus on commonalities — of say, shared purpose, commitments to goals and desirable qualities of the work experience — most likely benefit a workplace?

Whenever we categorize persons, even with the best of intentions, we risk minimizing their individuality and undermining their human dignity. 

If there are misunderstandings or apparent divisions between individuals, it may well be because they do not understand each other well. That is cause for some one-on-one conversations, not a consultant’s seminar.

Elements of Leadership, Building Managerial Trust

Here’s a one-page visual distillation of essential leadership ideas that moves beyond the clichés. Presented in a mind map format, this graphic of Leadership Elements:

• Defines leader and leadership; performance, and morale
• Specifies the functions of leadership in affecting an organization and individuals
• Explains the critical relationship between the systems of leadership that are supported or thwarted by an organization, and the efforts of the individual leader
• Declares the relationship of leadership competencies to the level of organizational responsibility, and the relative importance of capacity for dealing with complexity 
• Lists the prime actions that effective leaders take to positively impact results
• Challenges the idea that deficiency of performance is related to individual effort — and suggests four areas of inquiry for a systemic view of performance assessment 

Also included, a mind map of the specific actions that managers and leaders can take to build workplace trust. The diagram lists more than 40 specific actions implementable by an individual manager. These actions are grouped in five major areas of activity focus (based on workplace research conducted around the world) — that managers can take to build trust among their colleagues.  

Those five critical areas of managerial attention: 

• Competence –– meaning not technical knowledge or skill, but your capacity as a manager or leader to give people what they expect of you in that role. 
• Risk-taking — which means the degree to which you increase your own vulnerability by extending trust.
• Openness — which must be fulfilled in two basic varieties: Access and Disclosure.
• Integrity — which means the actions you take to demonstrate your commitment to clearly discernible values, ideally that are shared by your colleagues.
• Goodwill  (or Benevolence) — which means how much you treat your colleagues like humans you value, and not like mere objects of production.

Download the two graphics (in a PDF) here.

Reconsidering the Proper Corporate Master

If you manage in an organization owned by someone other than yourself, to whom do you owe your loyalty and best efforts?

In the private sector the overwhelmingly popular answer, of course, is to the stockholders. “Maximize shareholder value” has become a ubiquitous managerial mantra and rallying cry sung in unison across all industries, reverberating throughout corporate corridors the world over. 

The ethos of serving the interests of a business’s stockholders has become so commonplace, it is veritably self-evident. Unless you’ve read the thinking of the late Sumantra Ghoshal of the London Business School. Consider his argument about appropriate corporate loyalty and see if you don’t reconsider your reflexive response.

The [prevailing economic] theory assumes that labor markets are perfectly efficient—in other words, the wages of every employee fully represent the value of his or her contributions to the company and, if they didn’t, the employee could immediately and costlessly move to another job.

With this assumption, the shareholders can be assumed as carrying the greater risk, thus making their contribution of capital more important than the contribution of human capital provided by managers and other employees and, therefore, it is their returns that must be maximized (Jensen & Meckling, 1976).

The truth is, of course, exactly the opposite. Most shareholders can sell their stocks far more easily than most employees can find another job. In every substantive sense, employees of a company carry more risks than do the shareholders.

Also, their contributions of knowledge, skills, and entrepreneurship are typically more important than the contributions of capital by shareholders, a pure commodity that is perhaps in excess supply (Quinn, 1992). As Grossman and Hart (1986) showed, once we admit incomplete contracts, residual rights of control are optimally held by the party whose investments matter more in terms of creating value. If these truths are acknowledged, there can be no basis for asserting the principle of shareholder value maximization. There just aren’t any supporting arguments.   [Source: Ghoshal, S. (2005). Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 4(1), p. 80.  Emphasis added.]

Then there’s all the research showing that how a company treats their employees eventually translates into customer behavior, loyalty, and profit.

When you’re assessing priorities and the proper allocation of your fidelity, you might think past the first mantra that springs to mind.

Evidence-based Management? Let's Think About This

Evidence-based management (EBM) has such an appealing ring to it. Sounds like validity, authority, legitimacy, and, of course, efficacy. Seemingly all good things. The attainment of those seemingly worthy goals, however, is far from assured even in a serious EBM effort. Efficacy may well be the opposite of the effect an EBM effort creates. And those other qualities? They may be exactly the problem with EBM.

Here is a chapter for a forthcoming book on EBM that I wrote with Dr. Ruth Zaplin, Assistant Director of Key Executive Leadership Programs at American University in Washington, DC.

We suggest that managers likely will find EBM to be an elusive objective, much more difficult to implement effectively than one might expect. Moreover, we claim that the EBM concept may not be as desirable as it would appear at first glance.

Undermining EBM’s promise, we suggest, are the natural mental processes that managers and leaders would need to overcome when considering the value of “evidence.” We advocate for a more holistic and systemic approach to management, and champion the helpful role of dialog-based executive development such as executive coaching.

The chapter is: “Believing is Seeing: The Impact of Beliefs on Evidence-Based Management Practices.”

Zaplin, Ruth T., Blohowiak, Don. In press. “Believing is Seeing: The Impact of Beliefs on Evidence-Based Management Practices.” In Evidence-based public management: Practices, issues and prospects, eds. Anna Shillabeer, Terry F. Buss, and Denise Rousseau. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Leading Change: How to Get Others On-board (Forget the Clichés)

If you’re working, you’re in the middle of a change effort: goals change, priorities change, processes change, roles change…

The familiar cliché claims that “people resist change.” But that’s not accurate. Pull back the curtain on this over-worn folk wisdom and take a look at the change management dynamic with fresh eyes.

Sure, most people don’t rush to “embrace” change. But that’s true for two reasons:

1. People change at different rates.

2. Most of us are skeptical of change because we don’t know what will happen to us when the change comes. Taking a wary stance toward change means we are exhibiting a perfectly normal, completely understandable, and entirely justifiable set of self-protection behaviors.

Note that being skeptical or assuming an attitude of assure me toward impending change is very different from resisting change. Only a very small percentage of people actually resist change — in the sense of opposing it.

It’s a safe bet that most of your colleagues will eventually adopt changes specified by your organization, and adjust to them more slowly than what you might want. Plodding along and reluctance (forms of passiveness) are not the same thing as resistance (an active form of opposition).

Often a slow rate of change by individuals is rooted in their genuine uncertainty about the changes swirling around them. Or their personal temperaments. Slowness to adopt new methods is innate in about 40-percent of the population who like predictability and certainty in their lives (ritual and habit protect one from anxiety).

Because managers tend not to be a patient lot, they try to force a fast-forward change adoption rate.

What’s the typical impatient—and ineffective—managerial response? Hammering people with edicts and implied threats (a “burning platform” message strategy — no matter how positively it is couched — essentially is a threat designed to motivate by fear).  So they communicate messages such as: You’d better get with it or get left behind. Get on board before the train leaves the station. If you’re not part of the new solution, you’re part of the problem… Would any of those motivational phrases inspire you? Or scare you?

When people are scared, they withdraw or defend. Neither of those are change-positive behaviors.

Rather than putting your reluctant colleagues on the defensive, engage them. How? By conversing with them and asking questions to draw them into a meaningful conversation about your change effort.

Here are some questions to further a dialog about your change initiative:

• What do you know about the reasons we’re making these changes?
  
  
• In light of these new circumstances, what is your understanding of how your job needs to change?
  
  
• What are your feelings about that?
  
  
• What suggestions do you have?
  
  
• What do you need from me to help you be effective in this new environment? What can I do to help this change process be as smooth and comfortable for you as possible?

Note that all these questions are open-ended. They beg for a meaningful exchange; they open the door for your associates to give you useful information about their personal perspectives.

In engaging in such conversations, you might learn that people misunderstand the reasons for the change initiatives. Or that they misconceive the potential impact. Or have reservations that are easily addressed.

Remember, in almost every change effort there are misunderstandings, misconceptions and outright distortions that circulate through the rumor mill. Unless you a) find out what these are, and b) address them directly, people will act in accord with these false premises. And waste a whole lot of time and energy unnecessarily.

If there’s one meaningful change you can make that will have lasting impact, it’s to involve your associates in conversations that will change the way you manage — and they implement — change.

How to Watch for Ethical Danger Signs in Your Workplace

Almost everyone at some time faces pressure to cut ethical corners on the job.

Here are some guidelines to help you know when you should raise your own alarms about potential problems with business ethics in your workplace.

Danger signs of potential ethical violations include:

• • Directives that violate the law, vary significantly from accepted practices, or are contrary to your organization’s own policies or values statement
    
    
  • Pressure, subtle or overt, to mislead, lie, cheat or steal
    
    
  • Instructions to change, falsify, hide or destroy documentation; or to keep no records of something that ordinarily should be documented
    
    
  • Requests or demands for you to swear loyalty or secrecy
    
    
  • Whispers, closed doors and secret meetings
    
    
  • Midnight shredding parties
    
    
  • People saying phrases such as:
    
    
    • Don’t be such a saint, Scout, or goodie two shoes!
    • No one will even notice.
    • Go along to get along.
    • Everyone does it.
    • Just this once.
    • Do it for the good of the company.
    • It really doesn’t hurt anyone.
    • Come on, nobody really cares about this stuff.
    • The ends justify the means.
    • This isn’t what it looks like.
    • This goes no further than this room…
    • This meeting never happened.
    • I’m counting on your loyalty.
    • Technically, this isn’t illegal.
    • No one else needs to know about this.
    • In the grand scheme of things, this really isn’t that big a deal.
    • Let’s get our stories straight.
    • If we stick to the company line, everything will be fine.
    • It may not seem like it, but this really is for the best.
    • If you repeat this, I’ll deny it.
    • I’m not telling you to do this, but…
    • Just following orders.
    • The boss wants this / says it’s okay / does it!

If you find yourself confronting any of these warning signs in your organization, heads up! You’re treading on thin ice, wandering into quicksand, plodding through a mine field. Choose your favorite metaphor, it could be very serious trouble ahead.

Proceed with extreme caution, courage, and conscience. Remember, you’ll never regret having no regrets.

Actionable advice about how you can take a practical approach to doing business ethically (one of my absolute favorite topics to teach in participatory seminars), will continue to be a recurring focus of this site.