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About 4 weeks ago an employee from another team transferred to mine.

Over the past 4 weeks I've witnessed concerning behaviors:

Communication - very blunt, can come off as rude and disrespectful. He and i talked about our respective DISC profiles and I felt it was productive. However his peers are telling me that he seems uninterested, not supportive, has a bad attitude and can be rude.

During our 1:1's he seems engaged, and eager and willing to assist. Basically Jeckyl and Hyde.

Uniterested:
-To be hoenst I think he might be looking elsewere, he does seem disinterested at times and at others (again in our 1:1's or skip levels with my manager) seems very engaged. It's confusing and I'm not sure how to manage this.

How do I go about giving him feedback that he needs to knock the bad attitued off while not saying who specifically on my team said it? How do i also go about getting him to be engaged and less combative?

altadel's picture
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The words you use to describe the person are not behaviours, so you'll need to find the underlying behaviours that lead you and others to descriptions like rude, disrespectful, uninterested, has a bad attitude, and so on. 

Regarding the need to give feedback based on third-party input, there's a cast for that from 2010: Third Party Negative Feedback: How to Decide. You'll need the specific behaviours rather than attitudinal descriptions, though.

Best wishes in helping this DR be appropriately productive!

lindagc's picture

I have a similar situation to yours - a new hire for a 6 month, 17.5 hour a week role came from within the organisation (a university) as a redeployment when her role was abolished. Her resume, application and interview were good and she has all the skills and experience to do the role without problems. She has been here a month and is just not getting it and her behaviour is starting to indicate that it is deliberate. I've observed:

* her being shown how to do something several times, demonstrating that she is doing the process while we go through an example and then being asked to continue the same process for the remaining set of work. When I follow up she hasn't done what was asked and we need to go through it all again.

* complaining that I am jumping all over the place when I'm going through a process, when she constantly interrupts me mid-sentence with irrelevant questions that then go off track. When I bring the discussion back to the point at hand she then has forgotten everything that was shown three minutes earlier and we have to start again.

* refusing to learn to use the Mac that is standard issue office equipment in our department and stating "it was unfair that she wasn't told that she'd be using a Mac and that if she knew she'd have to use a Mac she wouldn't have taken the job".

* spending 20 minutes trying to change the batteries in the mouse

* Asking her to let me know that she was finished a task so that we could have our scheduled one-on-one and instead of saying she is finished, speaks to my back in italian. When neither of us are Italian and no-one else in the office is italian. That one really was a WTF moment.

* Being given written procedures for a task, going through the procedures and picking up "errors and mistakes in the notes" but then being unable to actually do the procedure.

I've been having a weekly one-on-one and have gone through the job and the expectations but haven't made progress. If anything it has gone backwards.

My conclusion is that she doesn't want to be here and doesn't want the job and only took it because of the redeployment. Which I can understand but if you are given a job under those circumstances even if it isn't ideal, you do have an obligation to do it.