my employee is abrasive — can I ask others to be patient while I coach her?

A reader writes:

I work at a university managing the production aspects of the theater. I manage five staff members and one of them, Jane, can be hard to work with.

She can be quite abrasive and abrupt, and I have already had several meetings with her to address the harsh tone she uses. She started this year and comes from a professional background where she needed to be very assertive in her role or she would not have been able to get anything done. Her job now requires lots of student interaction and direction and she is speaking to them like she would these professional crew members she encountered in the past and some of the students feel like she is disrespecting and talking down to them.

On top of this, she manages two other staff members who have stated to me privately that they are finding it extremely hard to work for her because of the way she speaks to them. The chair of the department has even mentioned once or twice how he was taken aback by how she spoke to him.

She does not single anyone out, and does take my feedback and is improving, but she has a long way to go before she is where I think she needs to be.

Other than her tone, I am happy with the quality of the work she does. Her department has tackled some major projects this year with flying colors but she just rubs people the wrong way. I am worried she will drive students away because she will get (and is already getting) a reputation as being disrespectful and unpleasant to work for.

How much can I push her to change what seems to be a genuine personality trait? It does not feel fair to me to expect her to change so much and not also expect her subordinates and the students to meet her halfway. Am I wrong to think this is a two-way street and should counsel people to be patient with her as we work on improving? We have our reviews coming up and I plan to discuss this with her and her subordinate separately, I am just not sure how much to push her to change.

This is the first time I’ve had to manage a subordinate with the combination of great work but bad personality and I would appreciate any guidance.

First things first: I’m assuming that you’ve witnessed what people are talking about and Jane truly is being excessively abrupt or harsh, and this isn’t just people bristling at a woman being no-nonsense in a way they wouldn’t if she were a man. If the latter is what’s happening, you have a different problem to deal with, but based on what you’ve described, I’m guessing that’s not the case. So with that caveat in place…

The fact that something is a genuine personality trait doesn’t make it inherently okay to indulge it at work or mean that managers and colleagues are obligated to overlook it. After all, some people’s personalities include extreme grumpiness or impatience, or unwillingness to make decisions, or dismissiveness, or a mocking sense of humor, or quickness to anger. “That’s just who she is” doesn’t make those behaviors okay at work; they’re still things that an employee needs to rein in and a manager needs to address, because they’re disruptive and will impact other people’s quality of life and make them not want to work with the person.

Jane being curt and abrasive to the point that people don’t want to work with her is a work problem, not just a personality trait. It’s absolutely your business — and really, your job — to address it with her and to hold her accountable for changing it.

That would be true regardless, but there’s additional urgency here because Jane works with students — and presumably your team can’t be successful if it’s driving off students or quenching their love of theater.

Nor should you ask students and colleagues to “meet her halfway,” just as you (hopefully) wouldn’t ask them to meet a yeller or a harasser halfway. When someone is engaged in behavior that should be off-limits at work, asking others to meet them halfway out of a sense of fairness is actually profoundly unfair and would be an awfully demoralizing thing to do to people with less power than her (like students or any employees who are junior to her) … and for everyone else, it’s highly likely to make them question your judgment.

The message to Jane needs to be: “We’ve talked about this previously but it’s continuing and I need to see real change. You cannot speak to students or other staff members with the tone you’ve been using. In order to remain in this role, you need people to want to work with you and if they leave interactions with you feeling disrespected or dismissed, they won’t want to approach you again.” Ideally you’d ground this in specific examples to the extent that you can (like, “When you Michael asked you for X, you rolled your eyes and used a dismissive tone” or whatever specifics you can give).

If Jane isn’t able to incorporate this feedback and make significant changes very soon, you should start considering the reality that she may not be well-suited for this particular role. “Students and colleagues feel supported when working with you and aren’t afraid to approach you” is as much a reasonable requirement of the job as anything else about her work is.

More on this here:

my employee identifies proudly as a grump

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