Subversive Employees

Dear HBR:

Harvard Business Review

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4.6 • 782 Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do you have an employee working against you? Dan and Alison answer your questions with the help of Adrian Gostick, an executive coach and author. They talk through what to do when your direct report is creating problems only to fix them, one team member is hoarding knowledge, or two employees have created a disruptive office clique.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Dear HBR from Harvard Business Review.
0:03.9	I'm Dan McGinn.
0:04.9	And I'm Alison Beard.
0:12.3	Work can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to be.
0:15.3	We don't need to let the conflicts get us down.
0:17.8	That's where Dear HBR comes in.
0:19.9	We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts, and help you move forward.
0:32.4	Today we're talking about subversive employees with Adrian Gostick.
0:36.4	He's the co-author of the new book,
0:38.2	Leading with Gratitude, Eight Leadership Principles for Extraordinary Business Results. Adrian, welcome to the show.
0:44.3	Thanks, Dan. Appreciate you having me. Now, subversive employees and gratitude, why can that emotion be
0:50.5	useful when you're dealing with difficult employees? There's some reason why somebody's
0:55.0	being subversive. And the best thing for any leader to do is to start with positivity, start with
1:00.9	the carrot versus the stick. Now, I'm not saying you won't get to the stick, but you always try to
1:06.8	understand where somebody's coming from, why they may be acting in the way they are, and you begin by valuing who they are. And you begin by identifying the good things they're
1:15.6	doing versus just beating them up for the things that may be wrong.
1:18.9	That can be really hard, though, once an employee is making things difficult for you day
1:25.3	after day after day, how do you begin to address those problems,
1:30.3	even if you're coming at it with an attitude of positivity? Yeah, it sounds like you've had some
1:34.4	experience there, Alison, I can feel. It's true. There are difficult employees and then there are
1:41.0	toxic employees. The difficult we all have, and they can still
1:45.9	make our lives miserable, and we have to find a way as leaders to work with them. Whereas those
	...

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