Modern workplaces are full of diverse employees in all positions, from entry-level to the C-Suite and every role in between. With their varying backgrounds and distinct personalities, these unique team members bring countless benefits to the table – but also a few challenges.
Research shows that difficult or toxic staff members can reduce team performance by 40%. If unaddressed, they can negatively impact office morale and the workplace culture. But what is a difficult employee, and how can leadership address their behavior and manage them more effectively?
This guide offers practical advice for addressing and handling difficult team members with confidence and professionalism—for the benefit of all.
What Makes a Team Member Difficult?
Research shows that a difficult or problematic team member often exhibits some or many of the following traits or behaviors:
- Demonstrates high-conflict behavior
- Resistant to change
- Difficulty forming positive relationships with colleagues
- Failure to accept feedback and make recommended or required changes
- Negative attitude
- Avoids taking responsibility
- Poor job performance and work ethic
- Gossiping and creating workplace conflict
Why Difficult People at Work Are So Disruptive
Difficult team members don’t exist in a vacuum. Their negative and disruptive behavior often creates a ripple effect across the organization, negatively impacting morale, productivity, psychological safety, and more. Avoiding these issues isn’t a viable option, either. Instead, business leaders must address such toxic behaviors before they cause harm to their workplace culture and bottom line.
Common Types of Difficult Coworkers
Difficult or toxic behavior can assume many forms, not just the instigative or conflict-driven varieties. The most common types of difficult team members in today’s workplace include:
The Constant Critic
Some difficult staff members assume the role of The Constant Critic – people who focus on the negative or what is wrong in any context. They often refuse to address what is working well, much less offer solutions. In short, rather than using constructive criticism, they engage in destructive criticism with their teammates and leadership.
Such excessive criticism can undermine colleagues’ confidence and productivity. Over time, this toxic behavior can wreak havoc on team engagement and morale across the organization.
The Passive-Aggressive Teammate
The Passive-Aggressive staff member is typically conflict-avoidant, in a direct sense. In other words, these employees will express their frustrations and concerns indirectly by deploying one or more of the following behaviors:
- Giving the silent treatment or sighing/huffing heavily
- Leveraging sarcasm inappropriately
- Engaging in intentional unproductivity (e.g., submitting late work)
- Avoiding direct communication when required or warranted
- Intentionally procrastinating
- Making subtle insults and passing them off as jokes
Passive-aggressive behavior can create confusion and frustration for the employee, their team, and leadership. For one, the employee isn’t communicating their needs clearly, and, as a result, management can’t deliver a solution, subjecting the team to an ongoing cycle of toxicity.
The Credit-Taker or Blame-Shifter
Healthy teams assume clearly defined roles where each member pulls their own weight and takes responsibility for their duties. However, when a Credit-Taker or Blame-Shifter is in the ranks, the team dynamic can devolve into an unhealthy, even toxic, one.
Taking credit for a teammate’s hard work or deflecting responsibility erodes accountability and damages trust within a team. These behaviors can also negatively impact team cohesion and morale, leading to resentment and fractured team dynamics, including difficulty communicating and collaborating in healthy, productive ways.
The Resistant Employee
The Resistant employee exhibits several of the same behaviors as their Constant Critic and Passive-Aggressive counterparts, including:
- Resistant to change
- Uncooperative and unwilling to adopt new procedures, etc.
- Agreeing to perform a task but then not completing it
- Reduced motivation
- Delayed decision-making
- Lack of trust in management and other leadership
- Increased tardiness and/or absenteeism
Their unwillingness to change can have profound effects on the organization. First, they can slow down progress within their team and across the organization. They can also dull innovation and the company’s competitive edge. Finally, their colleagues often pay the price, shouldering heavier workloads and, in the end, a more toxic work environment.
5 Practical Tips for Dealing With a Difficult Person at Work
Working with difficult people requires addressing their behavior and setting personal boundaries in healthy, professional ways. Here are five practical tips leaders and employees can deploy in any work environment.
1. Stay Calm and Manage Your Response
When confronting difficult behavior, it’s best to remain calm. Approaching the person out of anger or another negative emotion can escalate the conflict rather than resolve it. By remaining composed, leaders will demonstrate professionalism while also indirectly showing the difficult team member the appropriate way to act in a difficult situation — a teachable moment!
2. Address Behaviors, Not Personality
It’s vital to separate the staff member’s behavior from who they are. Telling the employee they’re “difficult” or “negative” can shut down what would otherwise be a productive conversation. The employee could take these labels as a personal attack.
Instead, focus on their specific actions and behavior, noting particular, objective things they’ve done. Remaining objective and behavior-focused, rather than subjective and label-ready, will reduce blame and defensiveness and ultimately show the staff member that they’re a valuable member of the team who is capable of making changes to improve.
3. Communicate Clearly and Set Boundaries
For leaders wondering how to handle a difficult person in the workplace, clear, timely communication is the answer. Direct and collegial communication is vital whenever an issue arises. Addressing the issue right away, fostering accountability, and setting clear boundaries can significantly minimize misunderstandings and preempt ongoing friction.
4. Choose the Right Time and Context
The ancient Greeks gifted present-day leaders with the word Kairos, meaning the right, opportune time to take action or seize an opportunity. When it comes to dealing with difficult people at work, timing is everything.
Management must choose the right time and context to provide constructive feedback so that an employee is more receptive and able to process it. Choosing the right moment, preferably in a private and calmer setting, can keep discussions on track and ultimately solution-oriented.
5. Know When to Escalate to Leadership or HR
It’s critical to know when to escalate a situation to upper leadership or HR. If it is clear that an employee’s behavior is becoming more aggressive, discriminatory, or otherwise problematic for their own welfare or the team’s, it may be time to move beyond peer-level solutions and involve other leadership.
Keep a clear and ongoing record of evidence documenting patterns of difficult behavior. Also, make it clear that the organization has a zero-tolerance policy for harassment or discriminatory behavior.
How Team Building Helps Address Difficult People at Work
Team building experiences allow all team members to leave their day-to-day work environments behind, so that they can get to know and address one another in more productive ways. These experiences create safe environments where everyone can practice healthy communication and effective conflict-resolution skills in an entertaining yet constructive way.
Facilitated activities also help teams reset behavioral norms while rebuilding trust. By working together through their differences and difficulties, teams can correct course and carve out a more positive workplace culture that benefits everyone.
Ready to Improve How Your Team Handles Conflict?
Neither difficult employees nor interpersonal conflict can be swept under the rug. Positive change occurs when organizations face the (difficult) elephant in the room head-on.
Team building experiences are safe spaces that foster healthy communication and collaboration while reducing workplace friction and toxicity.
Discover how BEST’s team building and professional development programs can enable your organization to address difficult employee behaviors while improving collaboration and equipping everyone with the tools they need to thrive together.
