How do I address poor behaviour without being confrontational?

Written By Dannielle Hemelryk

Question —

"One of the people in my team always smashes their targets but the team don't seem to like them much. From what I've heard they're often quite negative and hard to work with. I've also seen a lot of passive-aggressive comments on slack. How do I address their behaviour without being confrontational? I want them to stay but I need them to be more of a team player."

Answer —

Ahh, yes. We like to call these people the 'brilliant jerks'. They hit their targets every month or quarter but they aren't team players, nor are they culture idols. Because their performance on paper is so strong, we often fall into a trap of protecting these people and letting their behaviour slide. What we need to keep in mind with our brilliant jerks, however, is that high-performers are actually an even mix of performance and trust. Why? Because low-trust team members kill productivity, psychological safety and the sanity of everyone around them

Based on leading research, here's three ways you could address this behaviour:

  • Redefine what success (a.k.a performance) looks like in your team. If you purely reward output, it's likely you are incentivising bad behaviour. Give success measures a 50/50 split based on both results and behaviour. So look at what they achieve (the numbers) along with how they achieve it (behaviour).

  • Seperate the impact from the intent and lean into the Situation Behaviour Impact model. When you pull them aside, don't attack their character. They possibly don't realise how they are coming across. Use the situational-behaviour-impact model to structure the conversation: "During Tuesday's brainstorm session (situation), when you rolled your eyes and sighed while Sarah was speaking (behaviour), it caused the rest of the room to stop sharing ideas (impact)"

  • Be courageous. As researcher Brené Brown famously notes in her book Dare to Lead, "Feeding people half-truths or vague feedback to make them feel better (which is really about making ourselves feel comfortable) is unkind." Lean into the situation, be courageous and start the conversation with them.

Dannielle Hemelryk