Dear Liz,

I am a new HR Manager in a 190-person professional services firm. We have a mix of senior-level, staff-level and clerical employees and a fun atmosphere in general, but there are pockets of discontent and bad energy in the company, too. I’ve been the HR Manager here for eleven months. I am the first HR Manager they’ve had, because the company is growing.

In my two “problem areas,” the supervisors are less experienced than in our other departments and it shows. At least once a month one of the two less-experienced supervisors comes to see me about a problem with an employee. They always say the same thing: “This employee has an attitude problem.”

I gather that before I got to the company, all a supervisor had to do was to say, “This employee has an attitude problem” and the disciplinary process would begin. There are employees working here who were written up and put on probation three and four years ago and the employees are still unhappy and the underlying problems have never been addressed.

I’m going to bring in leadership training for our managers and supervisors, and I’ve already begun an employee feedback program that is generating fantastic ideas for the company and helping the culture blossom. I need your help on ways to support the supervisors here who see attitude problems everywhere they look.

When they tell me that someone has an attitude problem, I ask them to document the problems but that is not the best approach, because then they start to document everything the “problem” employee says and does, down to his or her body language. That’s not the answer! What do you recommend?

Thanks Liz!

Yours,

Patrice

Dear Patrice,

Every new HR Manager runs into the same issue. When team leaders, supervisors, managers and even executives are perplexed by an employee’s behavior their first conclusion is often “This employee has an attitude problem!” I am happy to hear that you are coaching your supervisory teammates rather than blasting them for their inexperience. Still, you will never get anywhere by having supervisors document whatever employee behaviors they feel are indicative of a “bad attitude.”

Everybody has a bad attitude at times. I have a bad attitude when I get cut off in traffic and lots of other people do, too. “Attitude” is not a fixed characteristic. When a supervisor says that an employee has a bad attitude, they mean “I don’t know how to relate to this employee.”

It’s a learning experience for the supervisor, but only if they are willing to learn! Fear makes it hard for supervisors to be open to learning. They fear that if they are not the top dog, they are nothing. They’re embarrassed that an employee isn’t listening to them or has his or her own ideas.

The first thing every supervisor must learn is that just being the supervisor doesn’t make you right. It doesn’t make you smarter or more capable than anyone else. You can tell your supervisory teammates a few stories about times when you felt vulnerable or exposed and had to manage those feelings.

You can also talk one-on-one with the so-called “bad attitude” employees and get a better handle on the energetic mismatch between them and their supervisors. You can listen to the supervisor and the employee, separately and together, to understand where the points of friction lie.

Writing people up and putting them on probation is a last-century technique that solves nothing and only increases the tension in your workplace. Your teammates are growing new muscles, and so are you! The more you brainstorm with them and get beyond the immediate issue, the more successful a coach you will become.

Many if not most instances of “bad attitude” arise because a supervisor feels threatened. The employee probably feels a bit threatened, too. Fear makes us all act strangely. We get our backs up and we don’t want to soften because doing that might make us look weak. You can help get everybody talking and you can remind them how easily we fall into fear.

The way to gain credibility with managers in your company, as you have already learned, is to become their trusted advisor. You could proclaim “No more writing employees up for bad attitudes!” but that would just be more rule-making and bossiness laid on top of the bossiness problem you’re already dealing with.

You can soften and tell your supervisor peers, “I don’t want you to be in this position again. It’s too frustrating for you and for your teammates, too. Let’s find another way to tease out what’s not working in the communication in your department, and break down the logjam. That will be more fun and more instructive, too!”

You will become an expert in conflict resolution and culture-building without putting anybody on probation or writing anybody up. We are in a new millennium now, and the old-millennium rules for managing have thankfully fallen away. We can be human at work now — and for all of our sakes, we must!

All the best,

Liz