Motivational Speaker Carole Spiers says …
Use tough love to avoid workplace conflict
He was the troublemaker on the scaffolding team – and a threat to team building. Quick, deft and muscular, he was born for the building game, and whenever he was on-board, the job would be completed on time and on budget. The firm needed him all right. But he was trouble. In fact, he was stress on two legs.
Playing dangerous practical jokes on the new boys. Setting off the security-alarms for fun. Often going absent just when you needed him.
The site-foreman Tom had needed stress counselling from me after trying hard to follow the firm’s official management guidelines (‘partnership and common dignity’), which had made absolutely nil impact on the mischievous employee.
Now Tom needed more stress counselling, because he’d been moved to a desk-job and replaced by a sterner foreman who’d managed to sort out the young fellow inside forty-eight hours. This new man was definitely not a partnership type. He knew he was in a rough, tough business, and paid to make people do what they didn’t want to do. It actually seemed that the troublemaker had been waiting for this kind of response to his repeated challenges to the system. In no time, he’d mended his ways, and was even getting on fairly well with his boss.
Tom was at his wits’ end. He’d always wanted to be identified as the enlightened, caring, modern manager. Now he’d been seen to fail because of it. Meanwhile he was miserable working indoors at a desk.
I sympathised deeply with Tom, but suggested it was a sign that he might be in the wrong business. (At thirty-one, he was young enough to start again.) He is now much happier and stress-free, helping to repair holiday canal-cruisers at a boatyard near his home.
Overcome negative stereotyping – with ‘Value the Difference of Cultural Diversity!’ – just one of the Carole Spiers speeches that have decisively changed opinions.
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