“Supervising would be easy if there were no employees.” Well, at least, that’s the old joke! Most employees come to work ready and willing. Unfortunately, a few others come with negative baggage rooted in authority-figure, entitlement, or attention issues. Now the supervisor has his/her hands full.
Keep a watchful eye and well-tuned ear 
The worst thing a supervisor can do is miss the clues or dismiss negative actions. Bad behavior often starts small. You may just chalk it up to the employee “having a bad day.” But if you don’t intervene, it will likely escalate until you have a real mess on your hands.
No one likes to confront bad behavior, but if you don’t it’ll erode your credibility and the respect of your other employees. Failure to confront emboldens bad actors. It tells them that you’re weak, afraid, impotent, or stupid.
Anyone behaving badly at work has successfully behaved badly elsewhere. That mean’s they’ve had plenty of practice, know how and when to act out “safely,” and look forward to the rewards that go with it.
Those “rewards” may not be what you think. There can be great satisfaction in just watching you squirm, undermining you with other employees, getting a lighter workload, or the chance for a juicy lawsuit.
This is a kind of supervisor bullying! You have to disarm it fast!
Don’t wait. Act!
Consider the upside: When you intervene with a bad actor, you give that employee a chance to save his/her career, not a bad legacy for a supervisor!
Bad behavior often starts with being rude or dismissive like:
- Ignoring you or conveniently “forgetting what you said”
- Failing to acknowledge a greeting or positive gesture
- Taking their time responding to your voice or e-mail
- Disregarding an assignment or disputing its due date
- Being late or not showing up for meetings and/or appointments
These behaviors can be subtle and deceptive. There will be excuses, justifications, and debate about your interpretation of their actions. No matter.
Confront them privately and immediately. You are expected to uphold company performance standards and that includes appropriate employee behaviors. Letting “little” things go will turn into bigger things.
Difficult behavior, on the other hand, disrupts the way your team operates. It may include:
- Arguing with you or disputing work assignments and processes
- Constantly questioning your decisions
- Interfering with the work of others and stirring up negativity
- Unwillingness to work with others and complaining about coworkers
You can protect yourself and, oddly enough, these employees, by having clear performance goals and behavioral standards in writing that you review with them formally and then informally when there are rough patches.
Explain to them that their disruptive behavior can cost them a poor appraisal, their raise, and potentially their job. Don’t accept any arguments. Follow through on what you say, no matter how unpleasant they get. If they quit or try to sue you, oh well! That’s why you have HR and legal resources. Don’t let your employees hold you hostage!
Insubordination—the last straw!
The crowning glory for bad actors is getting away with blatant insubordination toward you, their supervisor, by:
- Refusing to follow a direct work assignment/order
- Calling you a name in front of other employees
- Calling you a name privately, but afterward bragging about it to other employees
A lot of opportunities to address bad behavior have been missed by the time things get this far. Here is where termination or legal action is the next step, one that’s a lot more stressful and time-consuming for you than helping the employee to adopt the right behaviors early on.
Keeping ourselves in check!
Our employees know how to push our buttons. However, our job is to listen and understand what’s motivating unwanted behavior and take action to defuse it constructively. It’s not for us to own the employee’s reasons for their actions but to help them change. Our business fitness is the well we go to during tough times. It’s how we sustain the courage to lead. Please do!
Have you witnessed an employee behaving badly? How did things turn out? Your insights will make a difference.
I agree, when it comes to bad behavior,as my mom would have said, you need to nip it in the bud.
However, in the last 5 yrs. or so I have seen more people, including supervisors and managers, coming late to meetings because they’ve been scheduled (and not by them) back to back. Email has become overwhelming. More and more is expected of all and it becomes harder to keep up.
Now that’s a smart “mom” for you! I agree about the plethora of meetings and appointments that can over lap. In those situations when we may be late or even miss them, we need to addressed the situation by respectful communication in advance or afterward. It’s when employees ignore the situation or demonstrate dismissive attitudes that communicate disdain that mark a problem behavior. Thanks for your comment. ~Dawn
What do you suggest when there is a “man in the middle” situation? My manager has not backed me up with two insubordinate assistants. I am working 10-12 hour days, and they are leaving promptly at 4PM. One is working on projects for the manager; he was on an “improvement plan”, and has not improved the quality of his work for me. The manager says that his work is up to par. The other wanders away for 45 minutes to speak to colleagues to ask questions that maybe require 5 -10 minutes of discussion, including pleasantries.
Time for me to find a new position with a manager that backs me up?
Barbara, this is a very complex situation with, I suspect, more than it’s share of history among all the players. Generally speaking, you need to document the performance of your employees, the conversations with your manager, any interventions you’ve tried to implement, and the specific impacts these employees are having on the productivity of the workgoup. All of these actions protect you from being seen as not intervening and performing your supervisory duties. Your last line is all that you can control. When a situation is beyond our ability to correct, then it is time to move on. All the best, ~Dawn
On this matter, I am on the recieving end. It seems that my manager is charging me with insubordination for failing to come up to a meeting.
I didn’t told him in advance that I will be away on a given day for first half but the meeting was not set in advance either. He told me via email at 9:30am , after I informed him that I will be away, that I should meet before noon. The commuting itself will take around 1 hour. I did managed to reach my workplace 18min past noon (I really tried to get earlier). My absense affected my department badly, as my manager has to go to another important meeting with Senior mgmt totally unprepared.
Now, I am trying to setup follow up meeting to reconciliate and work on how can this situation be avoided. I am willing to take responsibility of my action.
But he is refusing to see me even and not respond to emails/meeting invites.
What could I do in this scenario?
Thanks for sharing your situation. I would need to much more to answer your question. When a situation gets to this point, there is very likely more too it than the circumstances of this one event. If your boss is refusing to see you, it’s important for you to know why and then find a way to bring that about. You might want to ask someone in your HR department to help bring a meeting to pass. Good luck with your next steps. ~Dawn
If one boss behaved roughly to his subordinates repeatedly what should employee’s do?
Shahana, if treatment by the boss is repeated and serves to intimidate, harass, or create a hostile work environment, it should first be discussed face-to-face with the boss. This way you make it clear to the boss that what s/he is doing is problematic. If the behavior is denied or persists, you would go to HR or a superior. The issue is what does “rough” mean and then what impact is it having. Hope this helps.
I own a motel and have a nest of gossiping & back-biting behavior that is causing an unhealthy atmosphere. I have addressed each issue immediately and privately in a direct no-nonsense approach and warned of consequences for future employee disruptive behavior. The problem lies in that I also have a longer-term guest staying with us who is in the middle of it all and has made friends with one of my employees. I would love to kick her meddling behind out but she is there because her husband, a lovely hard-working man and their children are exchanging rent for expensive electrical work. They are basically homeless because of her. She has been ostracized by his family and many others and he and she both have been talked to repeatedly. We’ve heard him dress her down over and over but she has an insidious manner and just begins acting badly in a different way (constantly tapping my resources by cozying up to my employee who has been warned 3x about giving her anything at all because of her
constant mooching and office interruptions). The work her husband is doing would cost us much more than we can afford and kicking them out would mean leaving the children homeless in the winter. (Believe me she is playing that card to the hilt!). We have at least 3 more months of work and I have reached my cracking point and am about to throw them out despite it all because this is a twice+ daily problem. Do you have any words of wisdom that might help me stick it out for the sake of the children? We’ve grown to love them (2 boys) and feel sorry for them because of their wretched former-heroine addicted leach of a mother and don’t want to punish them further because of her. (No, the hubby will not leave her because he can’t ever work if there is noone to watch the children). Should I fire my employee who is betraying me over and over again?
LOri, I can see that this situation has you at your wits end. It’s clearly a complicated one but there a couple of things that you can try immediately. For starters, threatening consequences to employees not complying with your direction is meaningless unless you follow through. If you have warned the most errant employee three times and made it plain that a repeat means termination, then that’s your next step. To be sure that there’s no misunderstanding about the actions you find unacceptable, document each incident for your records as well as the meetings you have with the employee that cover them. You do NOT give the employee your notes. But at the meeting you expect your employee to state that they will not repeat their behavior. You document their commitment in your notes.
You also need to reinforce with any other employees what they can and cannot do with and/or for your guest. When they don’t comply, repeat the same process I described above. Make it clear that you value their work and want them to remain as your employee, but cannot tolerate certain behaviors. You might want to hold a weekly meeting with them to discuss the challenges they are facing with your guest and together talk about acceptable ways to deal with her.
If your guest has a substance abuse problem, she knows how to get what she wants through manipulation. Often the people around her are inclined to enable rather than confront. You don’t want to turn our employees into enablers. They work for you. You run a business. That means you have business dos and don’ts that are your standards. I think it’s commendable that you care so much for those children. It’s part of what makes your course of action stressful. The fact that you need the electrical work done is another difficult factor. You need to weigh what you’re trading off to get that work done inexpensively. No one said owning a business was easy. Hope this helps. Good luck.
My situation is very complex. I am the CEO of a very small business. I have recently been told by a very scared and intimidated employee that my second in command for the past six years has been undermining my authority, bad mouthing me both inside and outside the office, and bullying the rest of the employees so that they are terrified to come to me. This very brave young woman reporting this insubordination has come to me only because she is on the verge of quitting. The sad part of this situation is that I did not have a clue that this employee (the second in command) was behaving this way until I heard it from the other employee (along with some recordings she had made to back up her claims). Now that I know this, many other behaviors and patterns over the years are now becoming clear. What I had always dismissed as “just her demeanor” because she was so technically good at her job, I now see as bullying and insubordination. My dilemma, how do I confront her without revealing the source of my information? I have more vague behavior I can confront, such as rudeness and outright contradiction with me at staff meetings, but the vast majority of her bad behavior has occurred behind my back.
Jodi, as you say,this is a very troubling situation and it needs to be dealt with pronto. What you need to do now is your own fact-finding, totally independent of what your employee has reported. All you have from her is an awakening to realities that you have missed. Now that you’re more tuned it, you need to watch and probe for evidence of undercutting from your 2nd that you personally experience/witness.
For starters you mention “rudeness and outright contradiction with me at staff meetings”, neither of which are “vague” in my view. You need to make notes about what your 2nd actually said and did and confront the situation immediately after the meeting. Follow the process I explain in this post about problem employees
Then you need to observe your 2nd interacting with others and if what you see and hear is bullying, intervene at once. I would suggest that as a company you might undertake an employee satisfaction survey of some kind where the answers are anonymous, with some specifically directed at the leadership. In all you need to gather your own data, always protecting the employee who came forward.
All this has happened on your watch, so it’s up to you to investigate and get tuned in. The employee who has let the light shine on this situation has given you a gift. Now you need to do all the heavy lifting to get at the facts that you will use to correct the situation.
Your situation is not unique. We all get duped along the way. But there’s no sugar-coating what’s next. It isn’t much fun, but in the end you will correct the problem one way or the other and earn the respect of all employees. It’s worth the effort. Good luck and thanks for asking. ~Dawn
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I work in an industrial setting where there is a clear chain of authority. At the beginning of each shift a manager assigns tasks to workers that are congruent with each workers job classification. Occasionally, when there is a shortage of employees, the manager will assign a job to someone which is outside of the workers normal job duties, but still falls within the workers job classification. This is in a union shop with bid jobs, and conflict arrises when workers are asked to perform work outside of their bid job.
Recently, I witnessed a coworker increasingly being confrontational with the manager. It started off small just as your article described and grew over the last few weeks into an insubordination disciplinary action. What happened was the manager asked my coworker to do something and the worker said it wasn’t his job. The manager asked him more than once if he was refusing to do fulfil his duties and my coworker just kept saying that it wasn’t his job to do it.
The work the manager was telling my coworker to do was within our job classification and I wanted to warn my coworker that he cannot refuse work unless it is unsafe, but I thought I better not get involved. I understand that orders must be followed and if any disagreements arise, they are to be dealt with through the grievance procedure, that is, do the work and grieve it later.
Clearly my coworker was insubordinate and I knew eventually he would be held accountable. Still though, I think the whole mess could have been avoided if the manager had nipped it in the bud earlier. I know if I was in the managers position I would never had let it get to this level.
Joe, many thanks for this beautifully stated case. You are right, the union has procedures in these situations and members are best served following them. That’s what union stewards are there for. Supervisors blanch when employee’s say, “It’s not my job,,” and too often respond viscerally rather than rationally, which means meeting with the employee to discuss things. A supervisor’s job is to, as you say,”nip issues in the bud.” I agree with your conclusion and wish that both supervisor and the employee would have shared your thought process. Hey, maybe there’s a supervisory job in your future!Thanks again, ~Dawn