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Some employees don’t just cause problems—they create them on purpose. Subversive employees manipulate office politics, undermine colleagues, and make themselves look indispensable—all while frustrating the people who actually see what’s happening. So what can a leader do?
In this episode of Dear HBR:, hosts Dan McGinn and Alison Beard tackle this tricky leadership challenge with Adrian Gostick, coauthor of Leading with Gratitude. They explore how to expose subversive behavior, make a compelling case to senior leadership, and set up systems that prevent manipulation.
Here’s Adrian, explaining why expressing gratitude to a subversive colleague should be the first step to getting to the bottom of their behavior:
ADRIAN GOSTICK: There’s some reason why somebody is being subversive, and the best thing for any leader to do is to start with positivity, start with the carrot versus the stick. Now, I’m not saying you won’t get to the stick, but you always try to understand where somebody is coming from, why they may be acting the way they are, and you begin by valuing who they are, and you begin by identifying the good things they’re doing versus just beating them up for the things that may be wrong.
ALISON BEARD: That can be really hard though once an employee is making things difficult for you day after day after day. How do you begin to address those problems even if you’re coming at it with an attitude of positivity?
ADRIAN GOSTICK: It sounds like you have had some experience there, Alison, I can feel. It’s true. There are difficult employees, and then there are toxic employees. The difficult we all have, and they can still make our lives miserable, and we have to find ways as leaders to work with them. Whereas those toxic employees, those are the ones where yeah, we do have to take a firmer, more disciplined approach in our leadership styles.
ALISON BEARD: Dear HBR: I manage an IT system administrator and help desk employee who creates problems, then resolves them to make himself look to senior executives. For example, he’ll set up a laptop for a new VP of sales but somehow misconfigure the VPN. Then when the VP calls about it, he’ll act like it’s a big issue, and show that he’s working day and night to fix it, so the VP thinks he’s so dedicated and supportive. He’ll email at night and give out his personal mobile number instead of the general help desk number. Meanwhile, when he thinks an employee is insignificant, the case will sit for weeks before he helps them. He’s one of only two system administrators, and once a case is assigned that person owns it until it’s resolved. When I do spot reviews of cases and catch him doing this, I’ve warned him that he shouldn’t be having problems after standard set-ups, but he just moves on and creates different kinds of fires. I’m unable to get rid of him, he has too many backers in management. He’s been with the company for more than ten years and has systemically cultivated their support by doing these kinds of things. What can I do?
ADRIAN GOSTICK: When I was listening to this, I had flashbacks because I had this employee. I had a guy, I’ll call him Sam, who Chester, my coauthor and I, we had hired years ago when we were working together in a corporate environment. And the problem was like this, clients loved him, the senior leaders loved him, and his teammates thought he was the worst human being who ever lived. And he would be on the road a lot, and when he came in, he would actually just make rounds from each of the executive offices, pretty much spend the whole day out schmoozing with the executives, his teammates couldn’t get anything out of him, we couldn’t get anything out of him. When we complained to our boss, the CEO about him, he’d say work around him, he’s a great guy, clients love him. Just could not get him, we couldn’t help our senior leaders understand that this guy was really a challenge. And the team didn’t like him.
ALISON BEARD: So, what did you do?
ADRIAN GOSTICK: Thankfully on this one, he ended up shooting himself in the foot, and finally ended up showing his colors. But that doesn’t always happen. And there’s a very good chance if this guy here has been doing this for ten years, this system administrator, he’s not going to get caught, he’s just going to keep doing this. And so, when you have this happen you’ve got to start working the senior leadership yourself, you’ve got to be a little political yourself, and a lot of leaders hate doing that.
DAN MCGINN: I thought this was a fascinating letter and a fascinating problem. I’m naïve, I didn’t think that people would do this kind of thing. We’ve been doing the show for a couple of years now and I don’t think I’ve used the word diabolical. It’s evil, but it’s really cleverly evil. It reminded me of that cartoon that was on when I was a kid, there was that theme song, here I come to save the day. He creates a problem, and then he sort of swoops in, and sweats, and works hard, and solves it. I can see how annoying this would be to be his boss, but as a game goes, man, he’s found a way to score the system.
ALISON BEARD: It’s interesting, Adrian, that you start with the idea of explaining to senior leadership exactly what he’s doing, that actually he’s a poor performer because he’s not doing the initial tasks well, he’s only solving problems. But how does he do that in a way that doesn’t sound like he’s winging, or unable to manage his own employee, or even jealous of him because he has these relationships with the top executives?
ADRIAN GOSTICK: And you’re exactly right, Alison. This is a really difficult one because it’s very easy to come in here and look like you’re being a little petty. This guy’s the hero, and I’m a little petty. And so, you talk about efficiency. You say, look, we’re not as efficient as we can be because of this.
You talk about the steps that you’re going to take, because I got some of my people that may be distracted, let me tell you what’s happening with Sam here, and we’re not as efficient as we can be. So, we’re going to put together a ticketing system, and we’re going to make sure people live by this because this is what’s been happening. We’ve got 10% of our workforce who are the upper echelon, who are very happy and 90% of the people who are ticked off, and we can’t run a help desk that way. So, you have to try and bring it back to the business need.
DAN MCGINN: That ticket system was an idea that I thought of as well. When you place an order at a fast-food restaurant, there’s a little clock on the screen that starts ticking, and it does that because time-to-service is really, really important in that industry. It would make sense in this context that the moment somebody puts a ticket into the help desk, a clock starts counting. So, it doesn’t matter what the rank of the person submitting the ticket is, the time should be the metric that the helper is judged on, whether it’s the VP or whether it’s the admin, start to measure the time it takes them to close tickets and incentivize them against that.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Adrian, I loved your idea about going to the senior leadership with some information on consequences. You could say, in one sense, 90% of the people rate our services very poorly because they’re not being responded to in a timely fashion. You could also say, this is the percentage of time being wasted on dealing with senior leaders’ technical issues because of this one employee. Cold hard facts do tend to work.
ADRIAN GOSTICK: Yeah, there’s no doubt. You come with your case ready. Because this guy’s smart, you have to come in as if you’re an attorney arguing a case before a jury here. And you’ve got to have your data and your facts that say here’s how we can improve efficiency. And I love Dan’s idea. So few teams do this. We did some work once with the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels, they’re an elite fighter group, and they do these 200 performances a year, marvelous acrobatics in the air. And everything is verbal. I thought everything would be computerized, it’s not. And you can’t exactly go no, no, your other left. You have to be really careful when you’re up in the air. But when they come down, I love this, what they did was they removed all their insignias of rank, all their lieutenant’s bars, or their private’s bars, whatever they had, and they would all sit around in a room and debrief each other. And they could say, somebody who was sweeping the floors could tell the commander of the group, you were off on your flight line. And he would say, yeah, I was, I was 50 feet off, and I won’t let that happen again. And it’s that idea of we’re going to be very clear about what went right, and what went wrong, and there will be no elephants in the room. So, I think it’s rare when teams really do that. And I think that’s one thing that could help in this case.
DAN MCGINN: I do think that part of this problem might be hard to solve because I’ve seen this in companies. Alison, do you have a favorite IT person?
ALISON BEARD: No.
DAN MCGINN: Oh, I do.
ALISON BEARD: [LAGHTER] Who?
DAN MCGINN: I’m not going to tell. I’m not going to play favorites. But I don’t think it’s uncommon. You do develop a relationship with these people, you get the sense that some of them are more responsive than others. It’s like any other kind of service thing. This idea that everybody needs to be equal, you can’t go to your favorite person, he is sort of bucking human nature in that, don’t you think?
ALISON BEARD: Yes, but if those executives begin to learn that the only reason they need to work with him so much is because he’s creating problems with their computers, I feel like that might erode some of the trust that he’s developed. But we seem to have skipped the idea of talking to this person directly.
ADRIAN GOSTICK: Absolutely not. Of course, yeah, Alison, you’re exactly right. And you know what, there’s a very good chance he won’t believe you, he won’t buy into it, he’ll want to know well, who said this, and you’ll say, I’m hearing it from a lot of people, well, I don’t believe so. So, there’s a very good chance he’s going to argue, but you still have to try. But you’re right, Alison, of course, that’s where we have to start.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, I think it’s really important when he does have a direct conversation with the employee to come in very matter-of-factly with information, not make it personal, make it very much about what the team’s goals are, and outline what this means for him professionally, that you will be talking to senior leaders if this doesn’t change, and that might change his status with him.
DAN MCGINN: Adrian, instead of a random ticketing system where problems go to whichever IT person is available, should our letter writer assign cases, and do so in a way that the problem person is not getting all the senior people?
ADRIAN GOSTICK: Yeah, I think this is the last kind of idea here that we might have with this issue, is that the manager does need to be a little stronger. The manager can take control of certain issues. One, that the manager says, look, I’m going to be doing the assigning from now on. And also, at this point, if everything is tried, and you’ve failed, you can control other things. You can control this person’s ability to even get a raise. You can control this person’s ability to work from home. What’s the perk this person likes. At some point, you might get to that point that a manager has to exert some sort of influence to try and get the work in the performance parameters that he or she is looking for.
DAN MCGINN: Alison, what’s our advice?
ALISON BEARD: We have two suggestions. First, it’s always worthwhile to have a direct conversation with difficult employees. You come to that conversation armed with facts about his underperformance, how it’s so important for everyone to play their roles and serve the entire organization. But you can also explain the consequences, that if his behavior doesn’t change, you plan to talk to senior leadership, you might change the assignments he gets. It’s probable that because this person does seem to be rather diabolical in his playing of office politics, that our letter writer will need to start working the senior leadership herself. We think that she should talk about the consequences for the organization. Perhaps the percentage of people who are unhappy with their service, the percentage of time being spent on unnecessary fixes. And then we also would like to see her suggest solutions. Her handling reassignments in a different way, even instituting a ticketing system that takes some of the choice out of the process and debriefing to get everyone working more efficiently in solving these tech problems.
DAN MCGINN: Dear HBR: I lead a diverse 15-person team at an IT company. We’re all from a variety of backgrounds professionally, technically, and personally. One woman is our resident deep technical expert, but I’ve heard from her teammates that she hoards information and gets upset when she’s asked to share her knowledge. There are communication issues, and she is poor at time management. She’s always showing up late to meetings, missing them, or proposing reschedules. She often fails to follow through on action items. I don’t want to over-generalize, but she comes from India where the corporate culture is more hierarchical, so maybe the problems stem from the fact that she is a middle manager, while the majority of the team is junior to her, with only a couple of peers, and a couple one level above her. When I’ve tried to talk with her about all this, she redirects to other team issues. When I ask her how things are going in areas where I know that there are interpersonal conflicts, she tells me, great. I’ve tried different ways to give her feedback at various times, and in various areas, but she usually defends herself and rejects it. She says she’s being unfairly scapegoated. I’ve had similar conversations with others on the team, and they’re open and receptive, so I don’t think it’s my style or delivery. How do I have these conversations with her in a more effective way?
ADRIAN GOSTICK: This one is really interesting to me. I do a lot of executive coaching, and yesterday I was on the phone with a fellow who, it took us about 45 minutes, and everything was great, everything’s fine, I’m beloved of my people. And yet, there was a reason that the organization had asked me to coach him. But nothing would break through until finally, I did suggest doing a 360 with his people. And at that point, he did kind of say well, I guess one thing they might say is that I’m kind of Doctor No. I’ve been here a long time, and I know what will work, and what won’t, and I just don’t want to listen to all their ideas. I’ll tell them right away: this won’t work. All of the sudden, we started opening up, and we started finding out the way he was being perceived. And so, I think this is a little what’s happening here. This again, as we think about that idea of toxic versus difficult employees, I think this is just a difficult employee who is really overwhelmed. And I think probably would stand to benefit from maybe a little coaching, a 360 on her so that she can see how she’s being perceived by others.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, I came at this letter really disliking the knowledge hoarder that’s being described, but then I looked up some research that we’ve published that is really interesting and made me empathize with people who do have a lot of knowledge in organizations. Sometimes it’s because they fear they’re going to lose a competitive advantage, but it’s often just because they are too pressed for time, and they feel that all these other people are depending on them, and always asking them for stuff. That pressure causes them to just seize up, and say: I can’t, I don’t have the time to do this. In one study, people would even pretend that they didn’t have the information. And so, I feel like if we can find a way to break through that women’s natural reaction, feeling pressured like everyone’s coming to her, and she doesn’t have the time for it, that’s what our letter writer needs to do.
ADRIAN GOSTICK: I couldn’t agree more. I think that’s exactly right. The first place we start is that she actually might be that busy. And you’re right, the first time you might hear this, you might dislike this woman as this hoarder, and I’ve known somebody like that. But then as you think about this a little more, you might realize that she just doesn’t even have 30 seconds sometimes to explain stuff to somebody because it’s going to last five minutes, and I know it will! And so, I think there’s a few things we might be able to do as leaders to help her. One would be to backfill, cross-train somebody else in what she’s doing.
DAN MCGINN: What about this business of her being hierarchical and paying too much attention to that? Is that a mindset that a manager can try to make less of an issue for a subordinate? Is there a way to sort of open her mind to people being equal regardless of who’s a manager, who’s a direct report, who’s a vice president, who’s not?
AD
