Political Dilemmas at Work: How to Maintain Your Integrity and Further Your Career

Chapter Four

TROUBLEMAKER

You have a troublemaker on your team who is extremely well connected. You’d like to fire him—but you can’t!

 

 

 

 

Dealing with difficult people in the workplace is common enough, and most of us are well equipped with the skills necessary to handle these people effectively. The extreme cases can cause immense damage not only to us, but also to all the other people around us. Tough action is required, which can stretch our skills to the limit due to the consequences of our actions.

This type of difficult person requires delicate handling because of the apparent support he has at a senior level. How do we overcome our lack of power and move this dilemma in the right direction? Assertive action is required because weak handling or ignoring the problem will make the dilemma increasingly difficult to resolve, and hand the advantage to the troublemaker.

The Troublemaker Dilemma

Calling Mack a bully is probably a little extreme; however, he does have some rather unpleasant approaches that really upset other people. Maybe I should get him in front of the corporate shrink and see what he makes of Mack.

Normally, I’m able to smooth things over with people. Recently, a female colleague registered a formal complaint about Mack’s behavior. Being fairly adept at handling the subtleties of this organization and its people, I managed to get the complaint withdrawn, but it still had a big impact here.

Perhaps what surprised me most was the level of support that ...