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To deal with an employee's bad attitude, focus on his or her specific behaviors.
Harold S. Hook, the former CEO of American General insurance company (now AIG), once opined that there are only three ways to make a basic, fundamental change in a person's attitude: deep psychotherapy, deep religious conversion and brain surgery.
He may be right. The problem is, there aren't many managers around who are qualified to apply any of Hook's techniques.
If you are managing an employee with a "bad attitude," trying to fix it will do no good. The best way to deal with an attitudinally deficient employee is to put aside your concern about the attitude itself and concentrate instead on the specific behaviors that are sending your blood pressure into the stratosphere.
What's a Bad Attitude?
When you think about it, a bad attitude is just a judgment made by one person about another person based on what that individual says and does. It's a label slapped on another person's behavior when someone else doesn't like that behavior.
But rather than using judgments and labels, the trick to solving attitude problems is to focus on objective facts. For example, you really never know for sure what kind of attitude an employee took with a customer unless you were there. What you do know is that a customer complained about being treated rudely.
Even when you witness what you consider to be a bad attitude, you should always focus on the behavior-what this person said or did-not the attitude.
"But it isn't just what he said," you argue. "It's the way he said it. It's his tone of voice, and facial expression, and mannerisms and demeanor." OK, let's agree that the cause of the tactless behavior really is some deep-seated attitudinal deficiency. A person's core attitudes are pretty well fixed by the time he's 3 years old. There's not much you can do about that now.
What you can do, to start, is when you feel the need to confront someone who is in need of an attitude adjustment, never use the word "attitude." It's futile. Any person with a genuinely vile attitude has probably had that fact pointed out to him so many times that he's anesthetized to...