As you're thinking through your coaching practice agenda and rolling out a new coaching practice for your team in your organization, you may wonder what about all those difficult people? The ones I know that aren't going to be very wild about this new practice or will be difficult to coach in one way or another. Well, this lesson I want to talk to you about how you can approach this, some strategies to help you coach difficult people. Honestly, I teach an entire course on this, so I'm really giving you a very condensed version of the things that I know you should know but there are some key elements I think that I can help you with right away if you have a difficult employee on your team. First of all, we need to remember that difficult is not a truth or a fact. Difficult is an opinion about someone's behavior. So, even if we begin to define someone as a difficult employee, we are already down the road of interacting with them that way. If I believe you're difficult, I will interact with you in that way and that typically isn't good. So, the first thing is you have to catch yourself and recognize, okay, I'm defining someone is difficult and here's the thing I don't care if everybody agrees with you, when you find someone who's difficult, it changes how you interact with them and it decreases your effectiveness. So that's number one. Second of all, that doesn't mean that there aren't behaviors or performance outcomes that people demonstrate at work that are inappropriate and not effective and that need to be addressed, that absolutely happens and that's your job as a manager. And frankly, what I see happen more is that all too often managers ignore difficult behavior and then what happens is organizations actually build systems around difficult people because nobody wants to or knows how to deal with them and so they keep being there and really they are ineffective. They can cause a lot of problems on teams. So, yes difficult is a thing but we have to define it and second of all it really is something that needs to be addressed because it actually can be very toxic and damaging to an organization's performance and culture. So, the biggest takeaway I want you to have in this short lesson is how to talk to someone who's demonstrating difficult behavior. Now, most people, most managers don't have a problem when someone just missed a goal, so you were supposed to make 50 calls, you made two. You were supposed to have this delivered on Friday, it hasn't been turned in yet. You were supposed to be at work at 9:00, you keep coming in at 9: 30. It's very tactical, it's very easy to address, this is what happened, you need to change it whatever do a little coaching, that's how that works. What happens though for most managers is when they struggle to coach people when its behavior, so when someone is not listening, when someone is perceived as rude, when someone is perceived as arrogant, when someone is perceived as dismissive, when someone is perceived as defensive, these are all the kinds of things that people experience with one another and then it becomes really hard to know how to deal with them. And so the easiest way to help yourself is to identify what the behavior is versus the label. So, saying someone is rude is a label. What do they do in the world that makes you think that they're rude? That's the power question. What is observable; Oh, well they rolled their eyes. Oh, they stop and talking to me and walk away in the middle of a conversation. They interrupted people in a meeting. They talk about themselves and their lives more than others. They never or they don't ask questions about other people. These are the things that people do in the world that help other people arrive at a label. A label is just an opinion. So even though we have some general understanding for what rude and disrespectful and arrogant might mean, I think you'd be surprised what some people think it's disrespectful versus someone else. So, really being able to pull apart, if I'm a manager and I need to talk to you about your behaviors that you're demonstrating, my job is to prepare the facts and we talked about this, how to have that conversation, don't be stuck in a label. So, I don't want to leave my conversation by saying you are rude, you are disrespectful, we want to leave that , conversation by saying, "You know in the meeting I observed that you rolled your eyes. In the meeting I observed that you interrupted Johnny. When you walked in the door today you didn't say hello to anyone. In our one-on-one, you don't make eye contact with me." You want to focus on the observable behavior versus the label because what happens when we launch with the label, is that people will get immediately defensive because it's our assumption about why they do what they do and here's what I know for sure, the majority of people do not wake up in the morning and think I'm going to be disrespectful today. They don't wake up in the morning and think I'm going to be arrogant today. They don't wake up in the morning and say, "I'm going to be rude today." They wake up in the morning and they think things about other people which drives their behavior. So, someone who might interrupt someone in a meeting several times, it could be because they're frustrated impatient or passionate, it means a lot of different things. We don't really actually know, all we know is what we see. So, understanding that other people's behavior is for their reasons not because of the label we give it. So, people are not doing things to be rude, people are doing things based on their own thinking, that's what we have to help them understand. So, we're coaching a difficult person, we need to point point the observable behavior not the label and then we need to ask them if they're willing to change it because interrupting people, not communicating with team members, rolling eyes, yelling are not effective behaviors at work, they will cause performance issues if they're not already and so if someone wants to change that's good news then we can coach them. If they don't want change okay, then I will manage you. But that's your work as a manager is to really make sure that they recognize that the observable behavior is here and it isn't acceptable and then ultimately, what is the consequence if it doesn't change but that's the key with dealing with difficult people, is making sure that you are coaching, that the conversations that you're having are about what is observable and not the label that you give it. So just to recap, difficult is only difficult once you've decided that it is and if you believe that someone is difficult, you will interact with them that way. There are behaviors that people demonstrate at work that aren't acceptable and must be addressed avoiding them only makes it worse and it actually impacts and impairs your ability to lead your team because people lose respect if you don't manage those kinds of behaviors. And finally, when we talk to an employee about their behavior, we want to focus on what was observable, not on opinion either from you or from someone else. And we ask them if they're willing to make changes to move forward, those are the key takeaways from a book that I actually wrote, How to Coach Difficult People and then I also have a book called Five Ways for Thinking about Difficult People, because it's a factor, it's a real issue and I think it's getting worse not better but there are some things we can do as managers to help the situation. All of this to say, keep these ideas in mind as you're defining your coaching practice and working on agendas with someone you consider to be difficult.
