Ah, the joys of management (see icon!)

[graculus]

Well, apparently I have successfully completed my probation period (even though I thought it was 3 months and I have a couple of weeks left) and despite some minor teething troubles, I'm still in a job.

Speaking of troubles, I'm looking for suggestions on how to handle this particular scenario: we have a worker, let's call her K. She works about 12 hours a week on a casual basis and has helped us out when things have been busy; however in recent weeks, K's behaviour with the rest of the team has caused them to start tearing their hair out.

She's not dumb enough to do this kind of thing in front of me, but I understand from others that K's incredibly bossy, to the point of rudeness, particularly to poor J who is half her age. She's also been making passive aggressive comments about staff to other staff when they're not around, again not in front of me. Everyone is working really hard, but apparently nobody works as hard as K does, and everyone needs to know that.

Having already tackled K once about her not letting me know when she wasn't coming in when expected, I know that I am going to be exposed to a massive pity party, but it's getting to the point where the assistance offered by her to our workload is exceeded by the sheer annoyance she causes to everyone. In the interests of full disclosure, I'm also a bit hacked off with her myself, since she went straight to my boss and got her to overrule me when I wouldn't agree with a decision she thought we should make.

So, any ideas? Short of hiring a hitman through an anonymous Cayman Islands account, which is a bit beyond my budget... ;)

Comments

[captain-tiv.livejournal.com]

I agree with batteredhaggis. Passive aggressive works.

I was in a similar situation only as a co-worker, not as a boss. A co-worker of mine (I'll call her B and I think you can guess what that stands for *g*) told people she was the only one who did the work. She loaded the spreadsheets, she manipulated the pictures, she uploaded them to the internet, yadda yadda yadda. One day, another co-worker had a spreadsheet that needed loading and he came into our office. He wanted to know where B was. She was out at the time and I asked what he needed. He told me he needed a spreadsheet loaded. I told him I'd do it. He looked at me and asked if I knew how since B was the one who did all that. I looked him straight in the eye and asked where he ever got that idea since I was the one who trained B and since she went to all the shows the company had, I did the majority of all that work.

He was a wee bit surprised but after that day, not a single person brought B a job to do. :) They found out she was fibbing.

[graculus.livejournal.com]

Passive aggressive might work for her, but alas I'm going to have to deal with this...

[captain-tiv.livejournal.com]

Would she respond to a head-on confrontation or is she the type you have to flank from the sides? I'm guessing the old response of "You're not the only one who works here, ya know. Everyone else here does more work than you and you don't hear them overexaggerating their contributions" would work?

[graculus.livejournal.com]

I doubt head-on will lead to anything better than a full scale pity party... we've got a team meeting tomorrow morning (minus K, as she only works Mondays and Tuesdays) and I expect I'll be under significant pressure to sort this out. It won't get done next week, though, as I'm off work and I can't really not do this face to face. *sigh*