Tell me about a time where you dealt with a difficult member in your team!

Hello!

This relates to "Personal impact" dimension, where stories relate to stakeholder management, by handling disagreement or conflict situations.

• Pick a professional disagreement
• Explain carefully the arguments you used to convince this difficult stakeholder
• Underline your learnings in the situation

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Clara

At the beginning of 2022, a new employee joined the sales team, i was responsible for. We decided to hire him because of his great experience within the market, his large network and the fact, that he worked for a long time for one of our competitors. Due to the fact, that he wanted to relocate his centre of life because of his own family, we accepted a hybrid employment including specific week, when he would join the team onsite at one of our locations. We wanted him to systematically develop a key account management from scratch.

I therefore arranged several personal meeting days with him right at the beginning to make shure, that he would better unterstand our current customer situation, the way we treat them and how we contact them within our customer relationship management tool. He always seemed to to be highly motivated and full of ideas how to create a new strategy. In the following we defined regular meetings where he should give updates to his strategy and the development of the implementation. In the following things changed and it turned out, that our expectation did not match with his results. He was not only overwhelmed with the task itself but also having several topics with his own family. The obvious pressure to succeed was hard on him and also the age gap led to a tense relationship that seemed to hover between us. I therefore decided to respectfully confront him with my observations and to give him the change to also explain his point of view. Even though, his results did not convice us 100 % and led to a restructuring of his work, the honest debate helped both sides, to better handle with the expectations.

I am the Manager of a community. A team member came and yelled at me stating she did not want to help the rest of the team deliver letters. I advised her to please note that we work as a team and we all have to contribute. as She became more angry I advised her to go home and relax. She proceeded to throw her keys on my desk and walk out. 

a time where I dealt with a difficult team member was during my last internship when we were consulting for a social enterprise. What made this an even more difficult situation was that this member was my friend prior to the internship, we had gone on vacation together and so on. This team member was missing our meetings and not participating with the rest of us. So the next time she was going to cancel last minute because she had texted me that she didn't want to attend, I called her and spoke to her, first I asked if there was any particular reason why she hasn't been participating and if she needed any support, I made sure to reassure her that we are all in this together and we are all here to support one another and get it done, towards the end of the phone call I told her that we do need her to come to the meeting and participate. after that we worked very well together and I realised that a team works great when everyone is on the same page and when we all work together. 

Have a one on one to figure out root cause and to see how to change it

I have been dealing with that a lot lately through organizing hiking or organizing going out with many people to an event especially when people with very different characters and different interests.

I simply try to not annoy both of types. I try to make activities that is interesting for both in the program. For example, people enjoy going slow in hiking, others enjoy to run so I will try to make it average level and when the tired one we stop to have a break.

As well during a project, I worked with someone who would delay the work and did not address comments. He was a friend too and everyone in the group was annoyed. So, I took initiative during a meeting and talked firmly to him and after that he did the work perfectly and our friendship was not affected by my comment.

In my team two sales managers fought about a client account. I proposed a distributions of the according bonuses for that clients´  sales they were both happy with

I was worried about this peer who was not making their objectives. I asked if there was any problems in their life that would have an impact on their health and performance. I also advised them I would be there for any support or issues that they may face currently and in the future. I also asked if they needed additional time to adjust to any issues and I would be there to support and motivate them during this difficult period. I will ensure they get back to there same level of success as before. 

n,

one I had a very bad colleague, cheating on me all the time. I took her apart and talked to her, trying to understand her problems. also, I spoke to our bosses to make the situation clear and have the help of the whole team in solving it 

When I worked as graduate Researcher, one of my superiors would delay in giving feedback to the point that we could miss deadlines. I addressed this by sending numerous reminders for him to give feedback.

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While working as a student assistant I had a colleague who had to take over when I was not at the office.

After every shift I would hand over all the information she needed with a thorough description and she promised to do the tasks.
Every time she did not do the tasks on time or did not do them at all, because she “forgot”. 

Instead of having a talk immediately, I slet on it and the next day we had a good talk about how I could make it easier for her to remember.
We found a good solution where I booked time in her calendar to perform the tasks I could not perform within the time and I think it helped us both to talk about it.
I felt frustrated and she felt like she was not good enough at her job and starting to communicate about this was very helpful