Coaching Employees Who Need an "Attitude Adjustment"

If you’re like most managers, you avoid dealing with employee attitude problems, even though you know that employee attitudes matter a lot. Attitude affects productivity, quality, and morale. It also has a huge impact on collegiality, cooperation and cohesion. It can be the difference between employees embracing or rejecting development opportunities. Attitude can make the difference between retention and turnover. Good attitudes drive positive results. Bad attitudes put a drag on results.

How many employees have been "worked around," fired, transferred, or retired because their supervisors had the authority but not the courage or skill to tell them about an offensive but simple-to-correct habit? Leaders can change this pattern with our latest e-book where we provide the reader a conversation structure to address 10 different sub-optimal attitudes with employees at all levels. 

So why do most managers avoid dealing with sub-optimal attitudes. Avoid it, that is, until they can no longer be avoided? By then it’s too late, and the conversation is doomed to become a difficult confrontation.

Attitude is hard to talk about for three basic reasons:

1. It seems so personal—like maybe it’s none of your business.
2. It seems intrinsic to the person, so probably impossible to change. That’s why people say things like, “That’s just who he is.”
3. It seems intangible, so it is hard to describe in clear terms. You might think, “She is doing her job, after all. Who’s to say she has to do it with a smile on her face all the time?”

That’s why most managers mostly avoid giving employees constructive feedback about attitude unless the behavior is truly egregious. Unless behavior is so incessant that even you can’t take it anymore, you probably let most of the behavior slide. Sometimes you might make an offhand comment, a hint, and a suggestion. And you don’t push too hard, because those with poor attitudes are also most likely to take offense. Telling an employee he has a bad attitude is a good way to make a bad attitude even worse. When you do let it slide, those with “good attitudes” typically work around it just fine. This sort of thinking is how sub-optimal attitudes become accepted and absorbed into the culture, putting a drag on performance while hiding in plain sight.

The term attitude is used to zero in on that very special category of employee performance problems that matter so much but seems so hard for so many managers to actually get their arms around. As long as you think of attitude as a personal internal matter, it is going to remain intangible, and you will remain out of your depth. Plus, whatever your employees maybe “feeling inside is indeed none of your business. Stop focusing on the inside/personal stuff. 

Focus on the outside.Feelings are on the inside. Observable behavior can be seen, heard and felt. When we talk about attitude, it’s not about who the person is, it’s about how the person behaves. No matter how intrinsic the source may be, it is only the external behavior that can be and must be managed.

If you focus on that observable external behavior, all of a sudden it becomes really simple. On the outside, attitude is all about communication practices. And communication practices are habits. Habits can be changed, but it isn’t easy. The only way to shift from a sub-optimal habit to a much better habit is through consistent, disciplined practice of a proven technique over time. The proven technique functions as a replacement behavior. At first it is very hard. But it gets easier and easier over time. And eventually the best practice becomes a new and much better habit.

Do you want to be good at dealing with employee attitude problems? Here’s what you need to do:

• Don’t let attitude be personal issue. Instead, make it 100 percent business. Make great attitude an explicit and regularly discussed performance requirement for everyone. Make it all about the work.

• Never try to change an employee’s internal state; speak to only the external behaviors. It’s not about what the employee is feeling deep inside—the source of attitude issues—but rather what the employee is expressing on the outside. External behavior is something an employee can learn to perform, and it’s something you can require.

• Refuse to allow attitude—great, good, or poor—to remain vague in any way. Make it 100 percent clear. Define the behaviors of great attitude: words, tone and gestures. Spell it out. Break it down. Monitor, measure, and document it every step of the way. Talk about it. Hold people accountable.

• Describe the specific words, format, tone and gestures.  For example, when responding to others, "I’ve observed you folding your arms, rolling your eyes and saying ‘No.'"

• Connect behavior with tangible work outcomes. “This makes other people, including me, reluctant to approach you even when they need something from you. Also, when you manifest disdain for someone, that person has an automatic incentive to diminish the weight of your opinion. And it diminishes your personal brand in our organization."

• Make reference to the performance requirement or best practice from which the negative behavior deviates. “We all need to be available and welcoming to each other to keep each other in order to keep each other informed, cooperate each other, and meet each other’s business needs."

• Define the replacement behavior that you will use as a specific performance expectation against which to measure the individual’s improvement. Discuss some possible replacement behaviors and then decide on one. Using the previous example, the replacement behavior is smiling wide, opening arms wide, and saying “Yes. tell me more about that.”

• Continue to follow up in your ongoing one-on-ones. Pay attention. Monitor, measure, and document as best you can. Ask the person to self-monitor and report on progress on a regular basis.

It is no doubt true that every case is different, especially if one really tries to understand the inner feelings at the source. The good news is that inner feelings of each employee are none of your business. Using the outside lens of communication practices, we’ve identified in our experience the six most common types of individual attitude problems—aberrant communication habits—that have a negative impact in the workplace, and we have come up with names for the employees who exhibit them:

1. Porcupines
2. Entanglers
3. Debaters
4. Complainers
5. Blamers
6. Stink-bomb throwers

We will show you how to address these six most common attitude issues in a future post.

Also, check out our related posts about how to reduce workplace drama:

 Handling Employee Drama

How a Simple Triangle Greatly Reduces Workplace Conflict

To your greater success,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant

SMART DEVELOPMENT

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