Problem Children

One of the challenges of management is managing problem people. It's easy to be a manager when everything is going well. It's much harder to manage when it's not going well.

For many years, I've managed projects that haven't gone smoothly. I know how to deal with that. Sometimes it's the people, but more often it's the situation. And sometimes you just have to persevere.

But problem people are - well - more problematic. Working with problem people is bad enough. But, depending on the problem, you can sometimes just persevere - that is, sometimes you can just deal with people you don't want to have to deal with until you don't have to deal with them anymore. Or sometimes you can get problem people reassigned so you don't have to deal with them anymore.

But if you're managing problem people, you can't just persevere through it. You have to deal with it.

So you try to deal with. You talk to them about the problems. You talk to them about how to better manage themselves. Or what your expectations are. Or how other people - or even yourself - have handled similar situations. And hopefully, through these techniques, you can make your problem people into non-problem people.

But sometimes you can only talk to them so many times before you figure you're not going to get through. And that's when being a manager stinks. Because you have to deal with it, even it if means getting rid of the problem people.