When talking about performance, it’s crucial to consider both the technical (a.k.a “hard”) skills and the interpersonal (a.k.a “soft”) skills. An employee is not a high performer if they are technically excellent but tear the team apart due to their behavior.
After managing people for a while, you might catch yourself thinking about one of your direct reports that they are “difficult”, and you wonder whether it’s your fault or maybe the person is not a good fit.
As we’ll shortly see, it’s very generic and not helpful to label someone as “difficult”.
Have you ever come to work thinking to yourself “Hmmm, today I will do real damage”? Probably not, and probably no one else does. They may display behaviors you consider wrong or harmful, but still assume positive intent — people try to do the right thing and not err on purpose.
First of all reflect — are they actually getting to the desired results and keeping relationships, but they simply do it differently from you? Does it really matter then?
Attitude?
So maybe you think the person has a “bad attitude”.
What does it actually mean? If I tell you about a person you’ve never met before, that they have a bad attitude, but you never notice any behavior to support it, do they really have a bad attitude?