What To Do With An Irresponsible Employee?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Often, a manager is faced with the fact that his employees are trying to throw off responsibility, shifting the burden of unsolved problems onto their bosses or a colleague. If the majority of such people are on the staff, then this is a tangible blow to business. Why this happens and to understand whether your employee is irresponsible, you can already at the interview.

First you need to figure out whether the employee is driven by fear or is this a personality trait. There are two types of people: there are people who are really afraid of responsibility and avoid it, and there are people who simply do not tend to accept changes, they are conservatives. It is worth determining what type the employee belongs to.

This can be revealed already at the interview, asking the candidate certain questions. Don't ask right away if he is responsible. It is better to go in a roundabout way and ask a few questions from the category: "You were assigned such and such a task, how did you solve it?", "What did you do to get out of this situation?" ? ".

Also, in this case, the tool of coaches and psychologists called DISC does an excellent job of diagnosing a personality - it is a tool for assessing behavioral manifestations. It shows how a person behaves when making decisions, how he influences people, how he reacts to changes, whether he complies with the rules and norms. In our case, the assessment takes place on the S scale (constancy). It reveals how a person responds to change. For example, conservative people, going through this personality diagnostics system, learn that their aforementioned personality trait is not fear, but rather a desire for stability. They are characterized by words such as predictability, consistency, stability. They have a strong need for security and a desire to keep what they have. This is their personality type.

Personal conversations work just as well. If you see that an employee would like to change something, then first of all, he needs to be explained that changes are an integral part of his work, an integral part of life in general. This is the law of the world order, with which you cannot argue. He should accept this fact. Further, you can still recommend that he write down all the pros and cons of the changes, pay attention to all the disadvantages of the changes. If there are too many disadvantages, then it is worth discussing this issue with colleagues or management, ask their advice or help. That is, to see how an employee could turn these disadvantages into advantages, or who could help him with this.

Sometimes the fear of unnecessary responsibility is dictated by the fact that a person is afraid of public opinion, because of this, one does not really want to crawl out on the rampage, change something, and so on. Here it is still worth starting to step out of your comfort zone on the sly. On the part of the management: to give the employee tasks that he is not used to performing, new tasks, to allow him to independently solve them as he can at the moment. On the part of the employee, for every unpleasant task performed, to reward himself with something, to praise.

Such people still have a tendency to postpone unpleasant things for later. Then you can give this advice: let the employee start the first week of work with unpleasant deeds, and then their implementation should be followed by praise, both from the management, and self-praise and reward for each completed task.

If we talk about the first type of people who are actually afraid of responsibility. It is rather a psychological factor, past trauma. If a person really understands that he is afraid and is simply not ready for changes, then in this case there is only one piece of advice. A person should remember which of the past events or situations could lead to such an outcome, to the appearance of fear. And to re-live this event, but from the outside, that is, look at it and at yourself at this moment from the outside. A person observes the situation and models thoughts and images of how he could at that moment live it differently in his favor, what he could do to make it end as positive as possible. He should visualize a positive process and the same outcome.

Answering the question whether the management should struggle with the fact that a person is afraid to take responsibility, I will say this - it all depends on the type of personality. If this is a type of personality that strives for stability, then it may not be worth it. Then the question arises: does the company need such an employee or is it better to leave? And if a person has experienced stress in the past about unsuccessful responsibility, then, of course, it is worth working on oneself, plus the support and help of the leadership in such a matter will be very useful.

The consequences for these types of people are the same - a feeling of unfulfillment and the thought “I am somehow different”, as a result of stress and dissatisfaction with oneself. Therefore, it is very important to conduct "testing" in advance and determine why the employee avoids responsibility. He does the rest of the work on his own: he realizes the results obtained, takes them for granted and decides for himself on his own - either to work with his fears, psychotraumas, etc., or to accept his denial of changes.