Is a Bad Attitude Wreaking Havoc on Your Workforce?

I don’t know a single manager who hasn’t had an experience with bad attitude. Looking over my own management career I’ve fired three people, two of which were for performance issues ultimately related to “having a bad attitude.” To determine if this is normal, I conducted a quick survey and garnered more than 100 responses.

The question, “With respect to employees, define what you mean when you state an employee has a “Bad Attitude,” generated the following range of responses:
- Not a Team Player, Does the Minimum, Disrespectful
- Insubordinate, Always Negative, Unhappy
- Pessimistic, Offers no solutions, Surly
- Tardy, Gossipy, Clock Watcher
- Prima Donna, Contagious, Argumentative
- Work to Rule, Abrasive, Rude
- Confrontational, Disruptive, Inflexible
- Argumentative, Defensive, Sarcastic
- Poor communication skills, Unpleasant, Instigates Dissent

The most significant observation is that nearly 10% of the respondent’s employees (past and present) are still labeled as having a bad attitude.

With 10% of our employees “destined” to have a bad attitude, knowing how to deal with this issue, or better yet, how to avoid it, is a must for any manager.

Of that 10%, we fire, terminate, let go or constructively dismiss at least 67% (my 2/3 ratio was unfortunately extremely accurate for a single data point).

It is important to point out that we can’t (in most places) fire someone for having a “bad attitude,” yet it is often at the root of the reasons which justify the termination of many employees. Bad attitude affects productivity, customer service, the ability of teams to work together and it lowers morale.

Given these statistics, every employee - managers included - should know that cultivating bad attitude is a severely limiting and costly career decision.

The reason why people with bad attitude don’t last long in an organization revolves around the central theme of contagious. The person with the bad attitude is never content to keep it to him or herself. They do their best, consciously or unconsciously, to infect others with it.

Strong agreement in the survey revealed that a single bad attitude has a widespread and contagious negative impact on an organization with respect to levels of productivity. Regardless of the source of the problem, we must “fix” a bad attitude, the question is - how best to do that?

The survey attempted to answer that question. The responses to “What have you found to be the most effective solution to the problem of “Bad Attitude?” suggest a wide variety of solutions and approaches. However, based on the raw input, there is an admitted lack of ability in this area. Many of the solutions offered were identified by the submitter as being ineffective.

Is it any wonder that the “solution” of “letting them go” is our most common approach?

Here are some of the strategies gleaned from the survey:
- Constructive dismissal, Say goodbye, Find the Cause
- Positively ignore the issue, Not my problem, Lack of Will
- Negatively ignore the issue, Training, Counseling
- Prevent it from occurring, Procrastination, Reassignment
- Laying it on the line, Address the Issue, Peer Pressure

*It’s important to note these strategies taken from the survey represent potential “problems” as much as they represent suggested “solutions”.

Given that more than 2/3 of employees with bad attitude are terminated in some fashion, its obvious layoffs are the most commonly deployed “solutions.” It does however, raise an important question: “Did the termination solve the problem, or did it just sweep it under the rug by pushing the employee out into the street?”

Based on the survey results and my experiences both as a manager and as an external consultant, here are the most common reasons I’ve found for why people get labeled as having a bad attitude. I don’t claim it’s complete, but I’ve rarely seen a situation not covered by these seven “root causes.”

- Those who just don’t like working for a living
- Those unwilling to accept unavoidable change
- Those with psychological problems of some type
- Those with stress/life challenges unrelated to the organization
- Those who don’t like their current job
- Those who disagree with a management practice
- Those incorrectly labeled as having a bad attitude
And of course, some or all of the above.

If you have an attitude problem to solve, how do we determine which of these is most applicable? If we go back to the list of solutions offered by the survey respondents, we immediately see that some of them are non-starters. We can’t solve a problem if we believe it’s “not my problem”, or by having the lack of will to address it. The only hope we have to figuring out what’s going on is to have an honest, frank and important conversation with the person in question. Guessing what the problem might be only leads to more complications and problems.