You’ve recently taken on another team. It’s been a couple of months, and you’ve spotted some issues – namely that there are a few people in the team who are either underperforming, or who have a questionable attitude. Here are some of the things you’ve experienced which is ringing alarm bells:
- Undermining you on decisions
- Ignoring your requests
- Passive-aggressive behaviour
- Argumentative behaviour, including in front of other people
If this resonates with you, then just know you’re not alone. Inheriting problems is a common issue to come up in coaching sessions and workshops with managers. Unfortunately, there’s no magic spell I can tell you that will make the problems and the problem people instantly disappear. If only there was! However, there are steps you can take to get things to a better place. It will require your resolve, and your preparedness to act. In this kind of situation, ignoring is not an option. In fact, your predecessor ignoring things and not giving feedback is exactly what’s put you in this situation!
Here are six things I advise managers in this situation to do:
- Check your assumptions – and don’t judge too quickly
First things first, difficult people aren’t necessarily bad people. Often, there is an underlying reason for why people behave the do but the frustrating thing for managers is this stuff can be hidden. It could be due to unhappiness; a difficult situation at work (or home); or a lack of self-awareness; fear; lack of confidence; lack of competence; or stress.
As Professors Nancy Doyle and Almuth McDowall say in their book, Neurodiversity Coaching,
“We don’t truly know each other’s intentions, and when we overlay our own inferences upon other people’s behaviour, sometimes these tell the story of our inferences alone” (p.117).
When tackling underperformance or poor behaviour, it’s important we go into questioning mode to get to the root cause. The danger of basing our response on the symptoms (the performance or behaviour) makes it unlikely the problem will be resolved. Here are some typical root causes of underperformance or questionable behaviour:
- Dissatisfaction with their job
- Lack of job security
- Unrealistic job demands
- Low confidence and/or self-esteem
- Lack of competence and/or capability to do the job
- General distrust of management due to previous experience
Action to take: See if you can find out what’s behind someone’s behaviour and performance issues. The Three-Level Questioning Technique can help us dig a bit deeper.
Download the 3-level questioning technique sketchnote
2. Get clear on the issues and raise them – swift and sure
Your difficult team member has been blithely thinking they’re doing okay. Their previous manager didn’t say anything to them about any of the issues you’re noticing. That’s an abject failure of management, and it’s not fair to put the whole thing at the door of the individual. The ongoing issues due to a lack of effective management is not their problem (yet).
It’s now down to you to make what has been unknown become known. Negative feedback – particularly if heard for the first time – can be embarrassing for the person which can, in turn, lead to them becoming angry, or silent, or withdraw, or put in a formal complaint. Their emotions are theirs to own and more than that, their emotional reactions are normal. Often, we can get uncomfortable as managers with this. We know we need to give a difficult message but we just want people to accept it so we can all move on. But us human beings can be messy, quirky, and not always guaranteed to respond in the way we expected. This is part of management, to understand this, get comfortable with, and work with it.
Maria Hamdani and Shannon Biagi wrote an excellent article for MIT Sloan Management Review setting out seven principles for giving performance feedback. While their article was geared towards working with neurodivergent team members, I think their advice is just sound performance management all round.
- Build rapport as a baseline.
- Time feedback well.
- Be specific and relate feedback to the job and task.
- Feedback should be continuous.
- Sequence feedback so that it works.
- Set goals and create an action plan.
- Feedback is about pacing.
Iain McCormick offers a further reminder about what good performance feedback looks like, in his book, Reflective Practice for Coaches,
“Feedback should be descriptive, constructive and non-judgmental. Word choice should be deliberate and avoid judgement. The tone of the message should promote dialogue, reinforce the positive environment, which in turn fosters learning” (p.137).
Action to take: Get clear about the specific performance issues you need to raise with the person by writing it down, first. Note specific examples that evidence the issue. Specific examples are important in these situations. Use the BEAR Technique or Feedforward Technique to help you frame the feedback you need to give.
Download the BEAR feedback sketchnote
Download the Feedforward sketchnote
Kate Russell, an HR expert, in an interview with People Management magazine in 2018 offers a sobering reminder of why we need to put the effort in,
“It’s about standards and how you communicate them. It’s not enough to say ‘you’ve not met the standard’ – you need to spell it out. If this went to tribunal, you’d need to show that the employee knew [and understood] what they should have been achieving, and that you were clear about what that was.”
3. Don’t confuse confronting with being confrontational
Many of the managers and leaders I’ve worked with over the past 26 years talk themselves out of tackling an inherited problem because they “don’t like confrontation”. The idea of confrontation can invoke fear in many of us. We associate it with heightened emotions, shouting, anger, upset, crying. But here’s the thing. Confrontation is different from confronting. And in my experience, when managers get this, it can be empowering and motivating.
Here’s how I summarise the difference:
| CONFRONTING | CONFRONTATIONAL |
| – Being challenging, giving direct feedback underpinned by specific evidence. – Aims to bring the unconscious into the conscious. – Focuses is on helping the other person learn and finding a way forward. Defensive reaction is normal – this is understood and space is given for processing. – Shock is also normal – again, space is given for processing emotions. | – Aim is to get one-up on the other person – we want to ‘put them in their place’. – Purely driven by emotion, often anger. – No specific evidence used – just gut feel. – Too much evidence – can feel like an onslaught. – Not two-way dialogue, the confronter dominates. – Reactive – focus is on giving ourselves relief rather than achieving a way forward. |
My number one tip when confronting an issue is to give yourself time to get in the right headspace before, and then time to decompress after. Even just 5 minutes either side can help. I’ve seen too many confronting conversations degenerate into confrontation because a busy, stressed manager is in back-to-back meetings, increasingly late, and then they hurtle into this important conversation frazzled and still focusing on the previous meeting. What do we think is going to happen in that instance?
Action to take: If you know you’re going to confront a person about their continuing underperformance and/or poor attitude, then getting in the right frame of mind is key. Once the meeting is booked, block out time either side. In the 5-10 minutes before, get yourself in a calm frame of mind.
A brilliant question to ask yourself, as part of your mindset prep, comes from the work of Professor Paul Gilbert – one of the world’s leading experts on compassion. He suggests that in difficult moments, we ask ourselves,
‘If I was at my compassionate best, if I was at my wisest, my strongest, and my most committed to try to address this in the wisest way I can, how would I actually like to be?’
4. Support is as important as challenge
Everyone is different. The kind of support someone values may well be different for someone else in your team. Likewise, the way in which people engage with being challenged will differ. Take the guesswork out and find out what this looks like for each person. This is about agreeing ground rules for effectively working together and creating a mutual relationship of open and honest dialogue.
As psychologist Adam Grant says in his book, Think Again: The power of knowing what you don’t know,
“It’s surprisingly easy to hear a hard truth when it comes from someone who believes in your potential and cares about your success” (p.87).
Action to take: Use my support/challenge questions in your one-to-ones with each of your team members. Download the guide here.
5. Reward, recognise and appreciate the performance you want to see
One study found that incentives matter. The researchers found that recognising and rewarding effort and learning could boost performance by signalling to individuals how they can change and improve (Chao et al, 2017).
Here are some questions for you to ask your team members (and remember, everyone is different – one-size-fits-all approaches rarely work):
- When you’ve been shown appreciation in the past, what approach has had the most positive impact on you?
- What are some ‘small’ rewards that you would love to receive? (I.e. outside of salary)
- Outside of tangible rewards, how do you like to be recognised for improving performance?
It’s important you point out when the person is making the effort to do things better, otherwise you risk falling into the trap of the Horns Effect. This is the opposite of the Halo Effect, coined by Edward Thorndike in the 1920s. Essentially, whereas the Halo Effect refers to the tendency to let a person’s good qualities – or at least those we approve of – colour our perception of their less attractive ones; the Horns Effect is the opposite. In other words, the person can’t do right for doing wrong because we only focus on their misdemeanours.
Action to take: Set a reminder to yourself to notice and highlight when the person has made the effort to improve. It’s not just about focusing on the end goal, but the journey along the way.
6. Get support for yourself
Dealing with inherited issues – particularly if they’ve gone unchecked for a long time – can be tough even for the most experienced of managers. This is why its important you have your own support network to help you. These might include:
- HR Business Partner allocated to your area – this relationship is important, particularly if you decide to exit the person(s) concerned.
- An executive coach
- A mentor – a more experienced leader
- Peer development group or action learning set with other managers
- Management training and development
- Your line manager
- Your peers in the management team you’re part of
Action to take: Think about who is in your support network and how they might be able to help you as you navigate the challenges of inherited problems. You don’t have to handle this on your own.
Post author: Dr Hayley Lewis. First published on the HALO Psychology blog 7 April 2025.
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If you liked this post, you might also like these:
How to manage people who are hard to manage
The performance-attitude balance: 6 ways to manage your rock stars
3 tips to help you have a good feedback conversation
6 tips to help managers improve poor performance
REFERENCES
Hamdani, M., & Biagi, S. (2022, February 01). Providing performance feedback to support neurodiverse employees. MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/providing-performance-feedback-to-support-neurodiverse-employees/
Housman, M., & Minor, D. (2015). Toxic workers. Harvard Business School Working Paper, 16-047, 1-29.
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