Offering no excuse for my instruction-reading incompetence, I utterly failed to publish a required posting on imparting bad news effectively.
Hopefully this will make everything right with the world once again:
Handling the Taste of Bad Apples
In handling any issue that impacts the pay, benefits, or employment of an individual, one of the steps made necessary by today’s litigation climate is to ensure that due diligence has been performed and documented. That is to say that if an employee is being counseled for undesirable behavior, and there is any possibility of punitive action such as unpaid leave or dismissal, there better be a paper trail documenting that this person has been repeatedly counseled about their undesirable behavior and the potential ramifications if not corrected. Doing anything less opens up any company, especially one that has salaried employees with benefits packages – or worse, one that has to deal with a labor union – to legal action for wrongful dismissal; even if the case is eventually decided against the complainant, the company still has to expend legal time and effort (read: money) to go through the mandated process, and likely with paid counsel in tow.
Psychologically too, there is a definite benefit to having someone see their bad behavior spelled out in black-and-white, ideally facilitating further reflection on the issue outside the workplace environment. Aside from allowing the employee an opportunity to see the supervisor’s comments wholly outside any contextual background, it also enables the employee to personally (or aided by professional therapeutic or career counseling) map a course from where they are to where they need to be (Marshall, 2001).
All this said, the actual technique to be used in addressing this issue must be chosen carefully, in that part of the undesirable behavior has manifested as confrontational in nature. It is important to realize the reason why someone is confrontational: Did their developmental environment simply wire them that way? (This is more common relationally to densely urban and/or financially oppressed backgrounds.) Do they feel intimidated, professionally, personally, or otherwise? (Is the “fight or flight” response at work here?) Are they compensating for some perceived injustice or inequality, based upon some personal (or personality) factor?
Certainly, the fact that this “problem behavior” is localized to one person would bias the decision process to think that this one person is the problem, but that is not always the case. With that realization as backdrop, counseling can be entered into without leading with a focus on the bad behavior; begin by an exploration of the “why” instead. This has a much greater chance of being perceived as a compassionate attempt to understand the individual, vice simply accusing him/her of wrongdoing and delivering an ultimatum. If this approach is met with resistance or a blatant deflection of blame, it may ultimately become ineffectual, but the attempt should probably start there if this employee is deemed worthy of salvation. Should the employee show any willingness to accept responsibility for their own behavior, then there is ground to be built upon. However, if “It's not me, it's all their fault!” seems to be the theme of their discourse, there is a good chance that this employee is not worth salvaging anyway. . . . If an apple is spoiled at the core, it is not even good enough for making apple sauce, but it can still be squished, just to make sure.
Reference
Marshall, A. (2001). Career counseling: A narrative approach [review of the book of the same title]. Canadian Psychology, 42(2), 145-147. Retrieved November 2, 2010, from ProQuest Psychology Journals. (Document ID: 98565134).
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