Dealing With a Difficult Team Member

The idea of having a team is that every member is unique in their contribution to the team’s goals and objectives. This makes it a challenge to work with a difficult team member. In my professional life, I have had to work with such people and, today, I would love to share how I have handled them in the past without it affecting the team’s coherence and output. 

First you'd want to have a clear understanding of what the difficulty is or where it stems from. What I tend to see is that team members start buddying up after a while and the person left out feels like their inputs don’t matter, hence, they detach and come off as difficult. Other times it is incessant whining as a way to get attention or just plain bullying others to have his or her way all the time. 

Next steps should be to engage with the team member but before that, you’d have to determine the best approach. I have to personally say at this point that talking down on the team member, especially as a manager, is not advisable. You want to solve a problem and not lose valuable team members. Also, humans generally like to be spoken to with respect regardless of any wrongdoing on their part. 

After that you can open a line of communication on the issue. Have a meeting with this team member and present the issue with them. It is important that you make this a conversation where you make it possible for them to engage with the issue as extensively as possible. The more perspective you have on it the better. Then, step away to have a clear thinking on what has been said. 

Naturally, such behaviour should stop once concerns are brought to the person’s knowledge. Frankly, most professionals often get these work-related frictions resolved without full-on confrontations. But in case it persists, this is where the last resort of confrontation has to come in. But while doing this, ensure you will actively deal with the aftermath because you really want your team to go on to reintegrate any alienated member and begin working again seamlessly. 

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