How do you tell someone they smell? Or that they need to stop handing out religious pamphlets at work?  Maybe an employee dresses inappropriately at work.  Perhaps an employee’s spouse calls the workplace several times per day.  What about your assistant’s drinking problem?

You could do what some managers do:  ignore the behaviour and hope it goes away.  Now, hope rarely works as a strategy to solve a problem, but let’s give it a try and see what happens:

They Smell:  If you don’t act they’ll keep smelling.  If you’re in a retail business, you’ll almost certainly lose customers.  If the aroma is only affecting co-workers who have brought the problem to your attention, they will know for sure that you don’t care and/or that you lack the courage to deal with a relatively simple problem.

An employee is pushing an opinion or unwanted material on co-workers.  This one is a bit more tricky  — you need to balance an individual’s right to speak freely with his coworker’s right to not be harassed at work.  This one is a level of degrees, but suffice it to say that if you’ve received complaints, the behaviour is probably already perceived as being too aggressive.

An employee is dressed inappropriately.  When I was in university, I worked for a retailer who had a strict dress code.  This included a ban on earrings for male employees.  This was fine until one of the senior executive’s sons showed up with an earring, and the facility manager would not address it for fear of reprisal.  Now, there are a whole bunch of things wrong with this scenario, but needless to say, when the manager displayed his cowardice in this regard, he had a facility full of male employees wearing earrings out of protest within a month.  Rightly or wrongly, the dress code fell apart, and the manager lost all credibility.

In these, and in perhaps most cases, it can look (at least at the outset) that it is easier to NOT engage in these difficult conversations.  In the short term, it probably is easier.  Longer term, you create all kinds of problems for yourself as a manager if you don’t tackle difficult conversations.  You erode trust, you lose credibility, and frankly you’re not doing your job as a leader.  Consider this one of the “burdens of leadership”.

If you want help with this difficult part of the job, listen to our podcast, and visit our page on Difficult Conversations.