151 Quick Ideas to Deal With Difficult People

74Ask Offenders for Self-Evaluation

Let difficult employees provide an assessment of themselves. This advice may strike you as the equivalent of handing an enemy a platform. But workers tend to be more critical of themselves than their supervisors, according to some attorneys who advocate employee participation in the evaluation process. Admitting to a problem, especially on paper, is half the battle of solving it.

Extend the employees’ participation to evaluations of their supervisors, especially difficult managers. That could provide eye-opening feedback because a wide gap often exists between how managers view themselves and how their subordinates see them. In a survey by Hudson, a New York City staffing company, nearly all managers (92 percent) ...