The Problem
Here's the situation: you have an employee who seems impossible to work with. They question every task and reject all feedback. You get caught in draining arguments over email or chat messages that go nowhere. You feel like you have to fight them on everything, and you're getting exhausted as a result.
You wonder why they won't just comply. Why they have to be so difficult. What's going on in their heads or lives that causes them to be such a problem. You save the message or emails as evidence of their insubordination, hoping to achieve some nebulous goal in the future.
The Real Problem
Believe it or not, the problem isn't (entirely) them. Chances are, it's mostly you.
You have let yourself get drawn into unnecessary and irrelevant arguments. If you've saving the messages somewhere, you've let yourself become an archivist and a bitter, passive-aggressive co-worker instead of the leader you're supposed to be.
By hiding behind emails, you are (intentionally or not) creating a low trust, low safety environment where this employee feels under attack. On top of it, you're not facing the problem like a leader. You're facing it like an anonymous online commenter.
The defensiveness you're experiencing might not be entirely a character flaw. It might be driven by a threat response to a hostile environment you have created.
Why This Happens
There are a few reasons for this.
- You are avoiding conflict - email exchanges create shields in the form of screens between you and the other person. Instead of facing the short-term discomfort of a direct and difficult conversation, you are dragging it out in email or message chains that will ultimately never resolve the issue.
- You're rewarding the wrong behaviour - especially if you let them have the last word and don't ever directly address it in person. You're teaching this person that arguing is a successful strategy to avoid trouble and end the conversation on their terms.
- Any 'evidence' you have is a record of failure - think about it this way: if you send the emails or message logs to your manager, will they see a difficult employee or a leader who brings themselves down several levels and engages in petty arguments? This documentation more often builds the case against you than the employee, and demonstrates your failure to manage the situation directly and effectively.
What To Do Instead
There are a few steps to completely reset the situation and bring it back to a controlled environment where you can very clearly position yourself as a good leader and flush out any actual performance issues that need to be documented and addressed.
First, take radical accountability.
The problem starts with you. Accept that this conflict-avoidant, online-only approach has made the situation worse.
Then, reset the relationship verbally.
Schedule a face-to-face meeting (or a direct virtual call if remote). Start by owning your part and saying the way you've been communicating isn't working. Take responsibility for it and suggest resetting the dynamic starting immediately.
Change the geography immediately.
Tell this person that you'll both abide by a new rule: from now on, no substantive feedback is going to be discussed through messages or emails. You will discuss it verbally and email or messages will be used to summarize what you agreed to. Kill the battleground completely as an option.
Focus on behaviour, not attitude.
Don't bother trying to prove they have a bad attitude. Nobody cares. Focus on concrete, directly observable actions and their impact on the organization. You can use a framework like Situation-Behaviour-Impact (on project X, when you did Y, Z happened).
What Most People Get Wrong
- They think their job is to win the argument or make the other side admit they're wrong by proving it to them.
- They focus on diagnosing personality instead of behaviour, and completely avoid their own role in the dynamic
- They believe that documenting failure (passive, archival) is the same as managing performance (active, future-looking)
The Bottom Line
Before you can "fix" the employee, you must first fix the broken environment that you've at least helped to create, if not created entirely. Stop being an archivist and attitude tracker and start being a leader. Their defensiveness is a mirror reflecting your own unwillingness to have hard conversations.