Angeli's story

- So let's look at a conflict situation where Angeli is dealing with an employee who seems to be resisting and how part of this resistant stems from the fact that she's stating the purpose as unilateral control. I am right, you're wrong and you need to do what I tell you. - My name is Angeli and I'm the manager for Employee Health and Safety at a hospital here in Southern California. A difficult or challenging conversation or management issue that I've had recently has been an employee who has a different perception of her work ability than what I perceive her work ability to be and giving that coaching and giving that expectation of how I would like her performance to increase when she thinks that everything is going well is a difficult conversation. So when she's at work everything seems to be going okay because she has her own workflow and her daily tasks and she gets those completed but the times when someone else needs to step into her role, even just one sick day anybody coming in to try to cover her position, is difficult because of her organizational style doesn't seem to match anybody else's organizational style. She knows what's in all of her piles, she knows what's in all of her drawers, but there's no rhyme or reason to where things are. She wants to please people but when you approach her with specific suggestions of how to organize her day she gets very defensive and things will become you know, I can't reorganize because it's so busy. I can't reorganize because I just have to get these tasks done. I just can't do anything more than what I'm doing. And the manager before me, her feedback to this particular employee was everything was always positive. - Can we put a name to, I mean a fictitious name. - Yeah, I don't know. - Just invent a name. - We'll call her Alice. - Okay, I'd like to be Alice. I'd like to understand if I was totally open to listening to you, if I wanted to solve the problem. - So the conversation that I've had with her before has been you know, I've noticed that your day is very scattered and haired and I've heard you say that you don't have a lot of time to do anything over and above and what I want to make sure is that you have the right tools to do your job. Do you feel confident that everything that you need to do in a day is done? - Okay, good, so I'm listening. As Alice, I would feel a little defensive now because there are a lot of things you have said which I may agree with, but the way you've said them to me put me on the back foot, like your days hairy then scattered and things like that which regardless of the accuracy, are statements that I would feel compelled to defend. - Okay. - I don't know if Alice is like this, but I would be like oh I would have to take a breadth and say yeah, to start this conversation, there's a high bar I have to acknowledge that I am not working very well and that's a hard thing for most people to accept. - Right. - So that makes it difficult.