When stress causes incorrect attitudes, it can produce unease among the employee and team, making their behaviour and atmosphere intolerable. Tips for unblocking situations and preventing fires:
Stress makes us all act strangely, inappropriately, and unpleasantly towards ourselves and others. Withdraw, get furious, criticise, complain, blame. […] When tension subsides, everything normally returns to normal.
Some people struggle to manage stress. These unusual and inappropriate behaviours will become character traits as they occur more often.
Reinforcing these incorrect attitudes will make them and others uncomfortable, making them intolerable or toxic. Indeed, when faced with various patterns of functioning, we may unintentionally engage in stress-related psychological games.
There are various maladaptive behaviours. We can simplify by saying they have two enormous families. People who will assume a superior posture and others who will assume an inferior stance. […]
Let's start with four things you shouldn't do before discussing how to handle problematic team members.
Passivity and inaction. This is the greatest method to let the problem worsen. The damage done by the time we act can be enormous.
Allowing these behaviours to impact you. We risk being assimilated as someone who validates these abnormal ideas and losing all credibility with our team.
Asking them to do the opposite to “fix” the behaviour. […] Because we stress others more by demanding they revert to normal behaviour, we usually get the opposite of what we desired.
Value judgement. This would feed the Golem effect, which we mentioned in the Pygmalion effect2, making it a major managerial blunder. This easy way encourages us not to investigate the cause of this behavioural issue.
As with conflict management, this difficult personality's behaviour suggests dysfunction. Time to create Sherlock Holmes. Here are five helpful keys:
Watch your behaviour around this individual. Stress breeds. So watch your instincts. You can get perspective and rectify yourself by observing yourself doing so.
Act quickly. Ideally, from the first signs of this behaviour to avoid tensions.
Check the facts. Check the facts before acting if a third party reports this behaviour.
Find the issue's cause. Remember that this individual is suffering if they act this way. Learn the origin.
Have an assertive conversation with them. The conversation must be one-on-one. The stress management approaches presented can be used for our teams. […]
These five keys showed us how to handle most tough characters. If despite several attempts, your employee doesn't improve or exhibits more dangerous, toxic, or pathological behaviour, which causes major problems in the team or organisation, it's time to accept that you may not be the right person to help them.
Communicate this to your superiors and human resources to decide if referring your employee to occupational medicine is best because this behaviour may be linked to an order problem. any medical condition like depression, burnout, etc.
To safeguard the group from this damaging impact, you may need to consider dismissal if the case seems too serious or difficult and not medical. It's one of the best ways to show respect for oneself and others to set and maintain limits.