Overview
A fact of work life for everyone in a supervisory role (this also includes the terms “management” and “leadership”) is that at some point, you will have to deal with difficult people. Unfortunately, their behavior is rarely difficult enough that you have reason to terminate them on the spot and be finished with the problem. No, they seem to do just enough to become a constant irritation for you but never enough at once to get rid of them.
Your success as a supervisor depends on your ability to deal with them effectively enough that they do not consume a disproportionate part of your time and impede the productivity of your team while getting them to stop the negative behavior. In short, you cannot allow a minority of employees acting badly to consume the majority of your attention.
No single person, book, or self-development source can supply the key to dealing with every variation of “difficult people” - there are just too many, it would be too big, and few people would read it. Fortunately, a variation of the Pareto Effect (“20% of something accounts for 80% of the events”) can be applied here: most of the difficult people you will encounter can be dealt with by understanding a few simple principles. We will present those few simple principles in this course. These are the difficult behavior types we will cover together:
- The Bully
- The Complainer
- The Sniper
- The Crude Jokester
- The Gossip
- The Know-It-All
- The Indecisive
- The Emotionally Fragile
- The Unreliable
- The Slacker
- Brown Nosers
- The Phony
- The Minimalist (Least I Can Do To Get By)
- Can’t Say “No”
- The Volcano
To receive PDH credit for this course, the student must pass a quiz consisting of fifty (50) multiple-choice questions.
Specific Knowledge or Skill Obtained
This course teaches the following specific knowledge and skills:
- When to act on irritable behavior with employees
- What to focus on before counseling an employee about their actions
- How to define their objections properly about an employee’s performance
- Some possible reasons why people may be acting inappropriately
- How to define performance expectations in unambiguous measurable terms
- How to differentiate between being productive and busy for employees
- How to clarify “fuzzy” performance expectations
- How to develop a useful performance assessment that makes it easier to document performance and improve employee behavior
- How to identify the causes of performance problems
- How to identify what motivates people
- Specific questions to ask people about their performance problems
- How to determine whether counseling or coaching is appropriate
- How to counsel effectively
- How to coach to higher performance effectively
- How to get employees to stop doing the wrong things and start doing the right things
- How to identify the legal links between employees, supervisors, and employers
- How to deal effectively with fifteen different difficult types of employees
Course
Click on the following link to the PDF document to review the course material before taking the quiz for credit.
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