When Does Difficult Behaviour Cross the Line?

There's someone in your business right now who behaves badly, and nothing happens, and I reckon as soon as I've said that, that person's face has flashed into your head because we've all been there.

We've watched good people leave because of these people who behave badly.

We've watched meetings get rerouted around them, people learning how to word their emails really carefully just in case.

And every time it comes up or you escalate it, somebody says the same things, "Yeah, but they deliver the numbers." And yeah, that is true, because what are you gonna say to that? They do deliver the numbers, and it's not a lie.

And then you start to wonder whether the problem's actually you, you're being oversensitive, whether you should just get on with it like everybody else appears to be.

But the reality is that is a decision.

It is a decision that someone somewhere...

And I've got a whole episode about identifying toxic workplaces, and I'm not saying that every workplace that has a difficult person or a difficult character is toxic, but there are characteristics of it when you are seeing that somebody somewhere has done the maths and decided that what that person brings, whether it's, you know, they're bringing business in, they've got a good relationship with the customer, they're getting results in the factory, what they bring is worth more than they cost in terms of their behavior.

Nobody says out loud, but that is why it starts to feel like you feel like you're the one that's going a bit mad.

I see this so much in the teams that I work with when I am doing my Fearless Influence courses, my Fearless Relationships courses.

A lot of the time there are certain individuals that can be extremely disruptive in a business.

And I really wanted to do this episode, but I'm also worried about doing it as well because what I don't want this episode to be is for me to be coming across as saying that I'm saying this behavior is acceptable, because I don't think it's acceptable.

But what I do know is that sometimes that is outside of your control.

Whether that person gets performance managed out of a business is outside of your control.

You might be waiting years for that to happen, and I want to give you some tools on dealing with that sort of person on how you do escalate it, but what you actually need to do and say in the room to be able to manage and to keep working in an environment where those behaviors have become accepted, and also to know when the line has totally been crossed and it stops being about, oh, this is a difficult personality or it's a personality clash, and it starts to become a professional conduct issue that needs to be escalated.

And if it's not being taken seriously when you escalate it, do you wanna go to HR? Do you wanna get legal advice? At what point do you do that? So that's what I wanna talk about today.

Bit of a heavy subject, but hopefully I can make it practical and helpful for you because I know there'll be somebody in your business that even if they aren't at the level of it's really toxic and everybody can't stand being around them, there will be people that you find particularly difficult, so this is gonna help you with that sort of thing.

But I think it's also important to recognize that it goes on, and there's lots of stats out there, but I've been having a look, and like the CIPD, they, they say that 81% of employers think they're doing a good enough job on bullying and harassment, but then only 36% of employees who've experienced some conflict say that it has been fully resolved at work.

So there's a disconnect there.

And I wanna start by talking about why this trade-off exists and that bad behavior gets tolerated.

And what I see, and it'd be interesting to hear from you, is this what you believe to be true? 'Cause this is all, you know...

Yes, I've got stats, yes, I've got information, but this is humans we're talking about, and part of this is my lived experience and my experience of working with teams at the moment.

It feels like this behavior is getting tolerated because of the commercial needs of a business, and I think the, the behavior that gets tolerated is almost in direct proportion to how commercially valuable that person is seen to be, which is why this is often people who are, say, customer-facing, commercial people that are really good at landing listings but feel like they can speak to any people however they want to speak.

It might be an ops or a site manager who hits all the KPIs but then humiliates junior people in a feasibility meeting.

Or it could be Somebody like a technical manager who likes to hold on to all of that knowledge, doesn't write things down, makes things particularly difficult in meetings.

There's someone in your business right now who behaves badly, and nothing happens, and I reckon as soon as I've said that, that person's face has flashed into your head because we've all been there.

We've watched good people leave because of these people who behave badly.

We've watched meetings get rerouted around them, people learning how to word their emails really carefully just in case.

And every time it comes up or you escalate it, somebody says the same things, "Yeah, but they deliver the numbers." And yeah, that is true, because what are you gonna say to that? They do deliver the numbers, and it's not a lie.

And then you start to wonder whether the problem's actually you, you're being oversensitive, whether you should just get on with it like everybody else appears to be.

But the reality is that is a decision.

It is a decision that someone somewhere...

And I've got a whole episode about identifying toxic workplaces, and I'm not saying that every workplace that has a difficult person or a difficult character is toxic, but there are characteristics of it when you are seeing that somebody somewhere has done the maths and decided that what that person brings, whether it's, you know, they're bringing business in, they've got a good relationship with the customer, they're getting results in the factory, what they bring is worth more than they cost in terms of their behavior.

Nobody says out loud, but that is why it starts to feel like you feel like you're the one that's going a bit mad.

I see this so much in the teams that I work with when I am doing my Fearless Influence courses, my Fearless Relationships courses.

A lot of the time there are certain individuals that can be extremely disruptive in a business.

And I really wanted to do this episode, but I'm also worried about doing it as well because what I don't want this episode to be is for me to be coming across as saying that I'm saying this behavior is acceptable, because I don't think it's acceptable.

But what I do know is that sometimes that is outside of your control.

Whether that person gets performance managed out of a business is outside of your control.

You might be waiting years for that to happen, and I want to give you some tools on dealing with that sort of person on how you do escalate it, but what you actually need to do and say in the room to be able to manage and to keep working in an environment where those behaviors have become accepted, and also to know when the line has totally been crossed and it stops being about, oh, this is a difficult personality or it's a personality clash, and it starts to become a professional conduct issue that needs to be escalated.

And if it's not being taken seriously when you escalate it, do you wanna go to HR? Do you wanna get legal advice? At what point do you do that? So that's what I wanna talk about today.

Bit of a heavy subject, but hopefully I can make it practical and helpful for you because I know there'll be somebody in your business that even if they aren't at the level of it's really toxic and everybody can't stand being around them, there will be people that you find particularly difficult, so this is gonna help you with that sort of thing.

But I think it's also important to recognize that it goes on, and there's lots of stats out there, but I've been having a look, and like the CIPD, they, they say that 81% of employers think they're doing a good enough job on bullying and harassment, but then only 36% of employees who've experienced some conflict say that it has been fully resolved at work.

So there's a disconnect there.

And I wanna start by talking about why this trade-off exists and that bad behavior gets tolerated.

And what I see, and it'd be interesting to hear from you, is this what you believe to be true? 'Cause this is all, you know...

Yes, I've got stats, yes, I've got information, but this is humans we're talking about, and part of this is my lived experience and my experience of working with teams at the moment.

It feels like this behavior is getting tolerated because of the commercial needs of a business, and I think the, the behavior that gets tolerated is almost in direct proportion to how commercially valuable that person is seen to be, which is why this is often people who are, say, customer-facing, commercial people that are really good at landing listings but feel like they can speak to any people however they want to speak.

It might be an ops or a site manager who hits all the KPIs but then humiliates junior people in a feasibility meeting.

Or it could be Somebody like a technical manager who likes to hold on to all of that knowledge, doesn't write things down, makes things particularly difficult in meetings.