In today’s story a boss decides to renew a particularly difficult temporary employee’s contract, despite receiving an ultimatum from one of his full-time direct reports, who he asked for an opinion on multiple occasions.
When would you make this type of demand? And what if this weren’t a temporary employee? Anna, Chris Doenlen, and I ask each other some thought-provoking questions in this podcast episode.
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Consider this experience
I was quite happy at my job, with my boss and coworkers until we hired a particularly difficult Staff Assistant. She was brought on as a temporary employee, contracted to be with us for one year. After spending an entire year dealing with her difficult personality, her contract was almost up and my boss was trying to make the decision whether he should fire her or renew her contract.
He constantly asked for my opinion, and it seemed he strongly felt he should renew the contract regardless of all the problems she had caused in the previous year. When my boss asked me what he should do, I told him that if he was going to extend this coworker's contract for any amount of time, I would be seeking employment elsewhere as I could not bear another few months with this problematic coworker.
I felt that my boss was prioritizing his own feelings over that of the rest of my team. He didn't want to feel guilty for letting her go, regardless of her problematic behavior and was going to force the rest of the team to suffer with this coworker in order to avoid feeling badly for doing his managerial job.
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What is a personality issue?
That’s where this podcast episode starts. Are personality issues the things that people at work do (or don’t do) that irritate you, or are they something else? Can you think of examples? Try asking the people you work with.
In answering these questions, we can start to understand how we seek to regulate the status quo (or at least what we think it is) at work. It’s particularly interesting to think about this in the context of our interactions with temporary employees.
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