Management Tips to Handle Difficult People

Lots of managers and supervisors are all promoted to a management position based on their skills. But some of them had advance training in the area of handling people--in particular, managing difficult people and in conducting discussion groups on doing so, and one challenge that supervisors sometimes face is how they will manage a difficult employee. If you can't control them, however, you can control this environment in hopes of coaching the employee to perform well.

Here are a few management tips to help deal with difficult people:

Document everything. As far as courts are concerned, in case it is not written down, it didn't happen. Even though you have a prospective worker sign a form saying that they know they can be terminated at will for any reason, you will not want to terminate them without any proper documentation. Terminating an employee without the documentation to back up your decision will make it much easier for a difficult person to succeed in a wrongful termination lawsuit.

Also document any training and/or coaching. Any kind of training that you give for your employee needs to be written down. In managing people, plenty of managers suppose this process is building a case for termination if the results prove less than acceptable. But in reality, it is just to prove the entire training process that you did. This also includes all training, no matter whether you trained employee or somebody else trained them, or you sent them to a seminar for coaching.

Focus instead on the specific behaviors or quality of work. For example, what should you do if every time you hand over a special project to a given employee, they complain or otherwise roll their eyes and either ignore it or talk about you behind your back? This is one example, but there are countless things to keep your eye on.

Lastly, be objective, not subjective. As I mentioned above, when managing your people, try to be as objective as possible just by mentioning the specific behavior, NOT the person, and focus on specific declines in the quality of your employee's work. For example, when documenting the employee's attitude, you may document specific examples where they displayed insubordination or other workplace-disrupting behavior. "Each time I delegated a special project to , he or she would ignore me completely, or complain I was being unfair to them." In the case this is read by a jury or your HR department, or else by your own superior, they will have a clearer idea of the full picture.