When I was a retail manager in my early twenties, upon coming into my store for each shift, the first thing I'd do is look at the store schedule for the time I'd be there. It was important for me to know who I'd be working alongside each day because it allowed me to determine where to to allocate people so I could accomplish as much as possible with the resources I had. You see, I helped lead a store with over a hundred people and I knew every one of them well. I knew which employees could sell water to a drowning man. I knew which employees were really great with customers and could be relied on to represent the brand well. I knew which employees were emotional basket cases whose hands needed to be held in order to get anything done outside their comfort zone. I knew which employees came to work in order to socialize and play with products instead of work. I knew which employees would be wearing wrinkled uniforms they pulled from a clump in the backseat of their car right before their shift started. I knew which employees were 'cheerleaders' who never failed to blow smoke up my ass as they were trying to convince me they were doing their job well when they were really just doing as little as possible. But as I perused the daily schedule, I was also looking for whether or not a very specific person would be there with me. I'll call him "Tim" for purposes of maintaining his anonymity.

Tim was toxic. He was a nihilist who hated that he worked in retail (or any job where he would be expected to be nice to people). He believed store management and company leadership always had nefarious motives behind every new initiative or policy or process, and he never hesitated to share his bleak views with anyone who would listen to him. Tim worked from 6:00am until 2:30pm, five days a week and his primary job responsibilities were restocking shelves with product and ensuring the price tags were updated and accurate. Tim gravitated towards this position because it allowed him to avoid customers for more than half his shift (since the store was closed). He routinely clocked out for lunch right at 10:00am as the store was opening so he wouldn't have to interact with the group of customers who were waiting outside for the store to open each day. He generally did his best to blend into his surroundings, quickly change locations within the store in order to avoid as many customers as possible, and was out the door like the Looney Tunes Roadrunner at 2:29:59 each day. He would never stay late, switch shifts or be flexible in any way. The chip Tim had on his shoulder was so large it could be seen and felt by any person within seconds of meeting him.

But here's the thing about Tim: He was superb at stocking shelves and ensuring pricing accuracy. He knew the store layout like the back of his own hand and he could find literally anything in the store (or in the warehouse) in seconds. He worked quickly and accomplished more during a shift than any of his coworkers by far. He had also been doing this job for almost a decade and was doing it in this particular store for several years before I arrived as a manager. He rarely half-assed anything or cut corners, and no one ever complained about the quality of work he did when he was left alone to stock his shelves and print his price tags.

So I avoided Tim. I avoided him because I knew he would get his 'job' done (the job of restocking) without any oversight, and if a customer needed assistance I would simply find someone who wasn't Tim to help them. But I hated seeing his name on that schedule when I came to work. I hated it because I felt the need to tip-toe around him and add another layer to my strategy for the day and that made me feel like Tim had a power over me that he shouldn't have. Equally as powerful was the fact that I didn't want to lose the niche capabilities Tim brought to the store. So I ignored it and I probably had less than ten conversations with Tim in the two years I worked with him (I went to a different store eventually). I don't think I was poor leader back then, in general, but there's no doubt I failed miserably when it came to 'managing' Tim.

So why was it so hard to address this Tim-shaped elephant in the room?

Most organizations have an employee handbook, and that handbook is full of policies and rules and regulations. Some are meant to protect the company from legal liability while others are designed to further the organizational objectives and maintain order. But throughout my career, the one thing all these handbooks have in common is that they are largely objective. Every policy and rule is written in such a way as to eliminate ambiguity should the rule need to be enforced. Did an employee violate a policy? Yes or no? The employee handbook should make it incredibly easy to answer this question as long as the question is something that is addressed in the handbook.

But what if the employee isn't really breaking any policies or rules? What if, instead, they simply have an attitude that slowly and vaguely eats away at team cohesion and makes people not want to be around them?

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Let's look at a topic that most organizations treat pretty objectively: dress code. If you are a marketing executive and you are tasked with creating a dress code for hundreds of customer-facing employees, it would probably consist of a list of things a person can and can't wear. But show me a dress code that is several pages of "do's" and "don't" and I'll still show you an employee who is following every single one of those rules but who doesn't represent the brand of the organization well. Then what? They aren't violating any policy so how is it addressed? Typically by adding more pages to future versions of the dress code. Wouldn't it be easier to have a dress code that was a single statement, speaking to the importance of representing the brand of the organization to it's customers: "While at work, employees are expected to dress in a manner consistent with brand standards." Period.

If we apply this to the two years I worked with "Tim," I can look back and say he rarely (if ever) violated any company policies. He was never late, he always finished his work, he wasn't insubordinate, he followed the dress code, etc. But because there was no line item in my employee handbook that said "don't be a total drag on the mood of every person you meet," there seemingly wasn't much I could do. Add to this the relative lack of comfort most leaders have when holding people accountable to subjective things, and it isn't hard to see how someone like Tim could manage to keep his job while continuing to act this way for so many years.

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If you're a leader and you're already thinking of the "Tim" you have working for you, and you're dreading the next time you have to work with him or her, there are a few things incumbent upon you as a leader that will help solve this problem.

First, the sooner you act and have a conversation about what changes need to happen, the better. Ideally you're new in position and are noticing the toxic person on your team right away so you can start the conversation process quickly. Because if you've been in a position of leadership over this person for months or years, and you've never addressed these issues before, you need to prepare yourself to be met with defense and potential hostility from the person who knows they have been acting the exact same way for years and has no idea why all of a sudden it is a problem today. If this happens, you absolutely need to do two things: 1. Own the leadership failure--tell "Tim" that you should have addressed these issues a long time ago but you didn't really know how to go about it and you honestly value some of the things he does add to the environment and didn't want to lose those things. Tell him these conversations aren't easy to have sometimes and ask him if he is even happy in his job, because happy people don't typically have a negative attitude. 2. Be honest about your feelings. This is not the time to say "People have told me..." or "I've heard from a lot of your coworkers that..." it is a time to ground your statements in your personal experiences with Tim and, more importantly, how they made you feel, because your feelings are not something Tim can argue. They're yours. Don't let the conversation get sidetracked by allowing it to focus on a single word or phrase or eye roll that Tim does; rather keep it focused on the effect of all those things together and how those things equate to an attitude that permeates every interaction you have with him.

Once you've laid it all out there, it's important you tell Tim that you're not looking for a response or a defense or really anything besides an acknowledgement that he understands this is how you feel and he needs to make changes going forward.

Over the years, I've found the "Tims" of the world are just generally unhappy people and it has nothing to do with work specifically. They've also probably never had a leader show any sort of compassion towards them with regard to what they would like to do or even if they are happy in their current role. The best you can do, as a leader, is to treat Tim like he is an employee who is worth saving and act accordingly while also not forgetting that there is a brand standard to uphold and that Tim is expected to represent that brand well in his everyday attitudes. These are the types of "action plans" that can't be filled out by checking boxes, but rather by writing out paragraphs together with Tim and coming to an agreement on some of the little things (that collectively make big things) he can do to change the perception of him in the store. And because those things aren't just created by you as the leader, but by Tim himself (with your guidance), it will be much easier to hold Tim accountable to that action plan.

Ideally you'll see a change for the better. Almost as good but still acceptable is if Tim exits the organization gracefully and without animus towards anyone. There are very few things as satisfying, as a leader, than having a heart-to-heart with a sub-par employee and finding out that they aren't a bad person, they're just cast in the wrong role. Help them get to the correct one.

To hear more in-depth discussions on leadership, check out the five-star rated, iTunes Top 20 Business podcast Hacking Your Leadership.



