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

[obelix]

Can you set her some objectives that she has to meet and review them with her and identify where she's doing well and where she needs improvement and while you are doing this suggest that there has been a few grumblings about her behaviour and that she might want to work on it. You can then review with her regularly how she feels she is doing meeting her objectives and how you feel she is doing and document the process.

Sort of give her the praise where appropriate and then let her know that she has a few things to work on.

Sometimes when people have a specific goal in mind they focus on that goal and become better team players.

Also this would give you all the documentation you needed if you had to suggest that she may want to find opportunities better suited to her strengths later on ;-)

[graculus.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is that although she does this work for my team, I don't actually supervise her and I've inherited this situation that at times works well, but not when she's bugging the crap out of everyone!

Anyway, team meeting minus her today (as she only works Mondays and Tuesdays) so we'll see what the consensus opinion is. I'm off next week, so if I'm going to deal with it that'll have to wait till I get back, otherwise team smackdown could start next week. ;)