Do you hold grudges against your employees?
I want to run through a little scenario here that echos situations I’ve personally been in over my career and I’m sure many of you reading have experienced something similar.
While doing your job you make a mistake. A stupid mistake. One that, arguably, you shouldn’t have made. A mistake that wasn’t rooted in a lack of training or experience, but rather immaturity or expediency or laziness. You’re a good employee the majority of the time but we all have off days and these kinds of mistakes can happen to the best of us. And right when you’re in the middle of making this mistake, as Murphy’s Law would have it, your boss or someone in a position of authority sees it happen, or they find out about it shortly thereafter.
Typically what comes next is a conversation between you and your leader about the faux pas and what on earth you were thinking when you made this decision. Hopefully the mistake isn’t career-stalling or even career-ending and you get to move on after an uncomfortable conversation. Or so you thought…
Instead, what comes next is the proverbial cold shoulder from this leader for weeks or even months. Little interactions between yourself and them seem strained. Their level of patience with you has plummeted. It seems like they’re almost searching for reasons to catch you doing something wrong or even trip you up. You feel like you’ve served your sentence in the form of that uncomfortable conversation. Maybe something was documented and that’s never fun, but you’re doing your best to leave the whole situation behind you and never make a similarly poor decision going forward. And yet at every turn you’re reminded of your mistake by a leader who wishes to punish you further.
This isn’t just disheartening it’s downright demoralizing. Have you killed your relationship with this leader? Have you lost their support? Will they attempt to influence others to see you negatively as well? Is your potential with your organization now in jeopardy? These are all very legitimate questions and I’m not speculating. I’m speaking from the experience of feeling every single one of them myself.
Now let’s talk about how to fix these types of situations whether you’re the employee who is being treated this way or you’re the leader who is having a hard time letting go.
If your leader is currently treating you this way, it’s a fantastic opportunity to manage upward. Everyone knows the importance of influencing people above you on the org chart. It's as much a part of great leadership as it is to lead people reporting to you. Whether you find yourself in this situation and it has only been a few days or it has literally been months, the absolute most important thing is to have a private, one-on-one conversation—not to give the leader a piece of your mind, but rather to apologize and attempt to move forward.
Apologize?! Shouldn’t they be apologizing to me?
Yeah, of course they should. But they aren’t. And you’re the one who, at the moment, will benefit more from having a good relationship with this person so you get to be the adult. Your other options are leaving your company (hopefully a last resort) or continuing to go to work with this cloud hanging over you and that shouldn’t even be a consideration if you’re career-minded at all.
So you swallow your pride and you have a conversation. Ok, what should you say? Start with: “Hey I could totally be misinterpreting things here but I feel like there’s been tension between us ever since that conversation we had a while back. I’d really like to know that I have your support here and I want to make sure you know I won’t be making any more dumb mistakes like that. Is there more you’d like me to do so we can put this behind us?”
The goal here is to make sure there’s nothing you’re overlooking that might still be causing this rift. The conversation should make your leader respond in one of two ways: either to tell you that, yes, there’s more they believe you need to do in order to show you’ve moved on and learned from the mistake. Or to confirm there’s nothing more you need to do in order to regain their support. Either way, you’ve stopped this perpetual tension machine that might just be running on autopilot and all it needed to derail was a clearing of the air.
If the tension in the relationship seems to continue after the conversation, there’s a good chance you’re reporting to a person who really shouldn’t be leading people, and that’s a conversation for another article. But the majority of the time this conversation will start the healing process and allow both of you to move forward. Speaking from experience, one of the best relationships I’ve ever had with a leader started out exactly this way. And the honesty and vulnerability both of us showed in those moment was the beginning of a fantastic working relationship that lasted years.
Now let’s talk about what to do if you’re in a leadership role and you’re currently in a situation like this with one of your employees. When one of your people makes a mistake, it can’t be ignored or it will more than likely happen again. And you as their leader have many different ways you can address the situation but you absolutely only get one shot at it. You need to make sure the response is appropriate, measured, and in line with the responses other employees have received when making similar mistakes. One of the reasons performance counseling sometimes gets delayed for a day or two is so leaders can take the time to research. It makes them more likely to respond appropriately.
But regardless of your response, your job as the leader is to immediately move on like it never even happened. Lead with amnesia. As far as you’re concerned the issue is resolved. It was resolved the moment your performance counseling session with the employee ended. If what the employee did was so egregious you can’t possibly detach yourself emotionally from the situation and avoid holding a grudge, you are no longer capable of leading this person. If the response to the mistake was dealt out appropriately, the record of the conversation, the paper trail, or the performance review is all that is needed. If the employee continues to make this mistake, they won’t be with the organization long because the organization undoubtedly has rules against that kind of behavior.
When you as the leader hold grudges against your employees for the mistakes they make, you destroy any possibility of them improving because the employee will constantly feel like they’re working from a deficit when it comes to their credibility. And that’s incredibly draining. It sucks out the will to improve anything and focuses all the effort on simply remaining employed. The employee will disengage and they’re more likely to display further evidence of immaturity. Often, leaders do this intentionally in an effort to get rid of an employee they've written off as a lost cause. But what they don't realize is that employees like this are often incredibly skilled at walking the line that keeps them employed while also doing significant cultural damage behind the scenes and it typically takes many months or even years to put together a documented pattern worthy of termination.
On the other hand, an employee who is permitted to leave their mistakes behind them and focus on self-improvement with you as their guide, will not only be more likely to do so, they’ll also be more likely to view you as an advocate of their success. You become the leader who treated them like the person they want to be instead of the person they are trying to leave behind. So it allows them to look back at the incident as something that led to their growth, and not something tied around their career like an anchor.
The moment you decide the mistake isn’t grounds for termination, you’ve also made the decision to do everything you can to help the employee move forward with confidence. This is what leading is. This is the job you signed up for. You don’t get to write off an employee unless you’re drawing up their separation agreement.
To hear more in-depth discussions on leadership, check out the #2 rated Management & Leadership podcast Hacking Your Leadership.
