The ‘difficult' person, in the difficult organisation

Sometimes, team conflict is just a symptom of a deeper organisational problem

Is there a particularly difficult, awkward or disruptive person in your team? Someone who always seems to be complaining, getting into arguments and just generally causing trouble? It feels like if only this person would just leave then all the problems in the team would disappear?

One such person was David. 

David was constantly complaining and challenging the authority of his boss, Nick. David and Nick were like chalk and cheese. David was good at his job but also very disagreeable – he was a man who relished conflict. On the other hand, Nick was very easy-going and agreeable – a man who hated conflict and hated saying ‘no.’ They sometimes caused stress in the team because Nick would constantly take on more and more work – more work than the team could realistically cope with.

Things came to a head after Nick had accepted yet another project, and this was just before Christmas when members of the team were hoping to start winding down. Soon after Nick took on this extra work, David put in a grievance alleging that Nick was coming to work hungover and that he would leave work at lunchtime, go to the pub, and return to the office intoxicated.

Everyone in the team who knew Nick, knew that this wasn’t true.

Nevertheless, there had to be an investigation which was very disruptive to the team. And, as expected, the investigation found no evidence to back up David’s grievance. David ended up apologising and breaking down saying that he had been under a great deal of pressure in his home life because his wife had just left him. Things returned to normal in the team but bad feelings between David and everybody else became worse.

Just seeing David as a difficult disagreeable individual who behaved in a difficult disruptive way because of stress at home is one way of explaining the situation. This might well explain his actions, or at least partly explain them. Another way of explaining David’s actions, or the behaviour of any ‘difficult employee,’ is to look at what’s going on in the team in general – or let’s say in the system. What pressures are there in the system that might be pushing people into behaving in ways that they normally would not?

If you do have to manage an employee like David, what can you do? 

You could performance manage them or even encourage them to move on? If they are stressed, like David, you might send them off to your employee assistance provider.

You might also want to pause and reflect on what might really be going on beneath the surface. How might David’s difficult behaviour reflect the stresses on the team?

A difficult or stressed employee is often the tip of a bigger systemic problem. By simply treating such problems as individual problems, you might be missing the point and missing important early warning signs that could prevent bigger problems in the future.

An organisation, or a team, is a system, rather than just a collection of individual parts. Some properties of the system exist independently of its individual parts. This is true of the culture of your organisation or team.

It’s like the human body. Systems and functions in the body for example ‘temperature’ or ‘the immune system’  aren’t located in a particular organ or body part, but emerge as a property of the whole system working together. When we become ill, a doctor has to investigate the underlying cause of a symptom, say a high temperature,  rather than just treating the symptom as an isolated thing in itself.

You might want to think of David, or your difficult employee, not just as an individual problem, but as a symptom of a deeper problem within the organisation or team. You might want to investigate what might be going on systemically that might be causing or enabling the problematic behaviour.

Organsational systems, just like the human body are affected by events and things in the external environment.  For example, if you live next to a busy road, with high levels of pollution, you may well go on to develop respiratory problems. If you slip on an icy pavement, you might break your ankle.  If you work 24-hour  shifts, that will cause a certain amount of stress to your body.  In other words, things going on in the external environment affect the internal functioning of your body.

The existence of pressure in the environment also affects the well-being of an organisation. If an organisation is facing overwhelming competition and the need to change, this will put a massive strain on everyone in the system. This pressure can easily find expression in the behaviour of employees who are vulnerable to such pressure. Some people might go off sick with stress, anxiety or depression. Others, depending on their personality, might become difficult and argumentative as did David.

People who are high on the personality factor of Neuroticism tend to react to stress in one of two ways. Either they withdraw or they become volatile and argumentative. Either way, their behaviour isn’t just an expression of their individual feelings, it’s an expression of something wrong in the organisational system. We could see David’s behaviour as being a bit like a high temperature in a person with flu. Of course you can treat high-temperature – you can send David off to employee assistance – but as a leader you also need to give some thought to what is causing the high-temperature (in this case David’s bad behaviour).

David’s complaint about Nick wasn’t about his unreliability with regard to alcohol consumption, it was perhaps more about his unreliability in failing to protect the team by taking on more and more work, when he had the authority to turn that work away. Everyone in the team felt fed up with Nick constantly taking on more and more work. He was a nice guy and nobody wanted to hurt his feelings and so all the grumbling took place  behind Nick’s back. David, given his personality (he was a disagreeable character), ended up being pushed into the role of expressing the team’s dissatisfaction with Nick’s management. David wasn’t just expressing his own grievance, but the grievance of the team.

Remember, the next time you encounter a difficult or struggling employee, help them; but also try to see the issue more systematically.  Ask yourself if  that difficult or struggling person is a symptom of a deeper systemic issue? Is the problem a troubled person or troubled organisation?

Look around your team and ask yourself these questions:

• Are people getting on with each other?

• Has sickness absence in the team increased lately?

• How long on average are people staying in the organisation - has this changed?

• Has the workload changed recently?

Many difficult employees are disagreeable people by nature. But, if they become even more disagreeable than normal, look deeper and reflect on the underlying issues in the team or organisation that might have caused the escalation. Try and address any underlying organisational ‘illness,’ rather than getting stuck on the ‘symptom.’