Difficult People at Work - Ignoring Policies!

New Year, new you, as the old adage goes - but what about the people around you?

Are you still going to be faced with the same difficult colleagues who made your life difficult in 2024, doing the same in 2025?

No matter your personal promises to yourself to be more productive this year, to be better organised, or to be more ambitious, if the people around you continue to be the source of the old frustrations.

Same Company, Different Agenda

Many people struggle with challenging and difficult colleagues and on the surface it can be the most frustrating type of challenge.

It is hard to understand why people with the same business values, as described by the organisation, and the same objectives, as defined by leaders, have such difficulty agreeing.

I hear frequently that the internal negotiations are much more difficult than the external ones.

The difficulty can be, not WHAT you are doing, but HOW you are doing it.

Let's illustrate a personality you might find familiar.

Ignoring Policies

Companies scale based on their ability to repeat key actions faster and more efficiently than competitors.

An operations department that can create true synergies can drive significant growth. Here are some examples;

• Sales processes - creating sales stages, tools and processes to efficiently drive customer acquisition
• Marketing systems - the ability to create and execute marketing campaigns at scale that are effective and clear
• Approvals - streamlined approval processes for content creation is a key element in today's fast past socially connected world.

But despite all this, some people simply will not follow the processes laid down for others to follow.

They challenge the system, refuse to comply with the standard operating procedures and they take short cuts.

Even worse - they are given credit when they appear to be successful!

These people cause significant churn within organisations, they damage morale and create tension between colleagues.

When everyone else is following the system, they do their own thing.

Why do they do it and why do they get away with it?

People who do not follow procedures believe they have identified a better way of working that suits them. They are likely to feel constrained by the current process, believing it to slow them down or limit their creativity.

This is where the danger lies for businesses.

It is simply not feasible to continue to review and update processes so that everyone is happy. I have seen many businesses struggle to produce anything because they are constantly debating the processes that exist right now.

When some people are allowed to breach the process without sanction then the whole system starts to fail because if one can, why not all?

It cannot be allowed to let some do things their own way, or to allow them the excuse that the system wasn't working. They must operate like everyone else.

So how should companies deal with the difficult people who break processes?

Have a formal process of review of processes after each significant milestone.

Review & Debrief

There is not enough proactive review of action in business.

This is something fundamental to sports using video review. Teams learn lessons from what happened, before moving on to the next challenge.

In business policies are often written in the cold, ideal world of a meeting room, where time is available and people calm.

They fail under pressure in reality. It is in reality that they must be reviewed.

There should be formalised review of processes after the fact with recommendations and anyone who has breached the previous process is NOT credited for doing so.

They did not invent a new way, they broke process and even if it was successful in that moment, it is not a reason to celebrate. The processes exist to drive performance long term and to deliver results that are scalable - not to account for individual moments.

Operational excellence is not created looking forward, it is created looking backwards and it comes to life with discipline to follow it.

The scale and performance for everyone is more valuable than one moment from one person.