Operational adjustment
If an employee has a habit of stating most questions in a slurred, unconstructive, or accusatory way, making a big problem out of any small question, don’t wait for him to run into you with it. On the contrary, wait for the situation when he runs into someone else, but — unsuccessfully, not productively, or even better — ran into trouble.
Your actions:
- support, sympathize (if necessary),
- gently stop the emotional flow and suggest looking for other opportunities and paths.
— I can try to play for you: maybe my version will be more successful?
Usually there is interest, and if you showed successfully, the person will be ready to listen to the algorithm as a whole.
To consolidate the first lesson, it is desirable to arrange a second lesson of the same kind when you are away from the problem situation.
The third lesson can be arranged for yourself, when a person begins to throw out a question at you, piling up emotions on problems.
Your actions:
- They smiled, breathed, they tracked the state of a calm presence, an excited person — they stopped.
- Now support emotionally (kind words, smile) and tell me how to (in a constructive way).
People are used to responding when a problematic situation has arisen, when a person has already made a mistake. In this case, both a simple behavioral adjustment and a suggestion to teach a more effective strategy is usually taken very personally, as a run-in, and instead of being willing to learn, you are more likely to encounter defensive-aggressive behaviors.
Therefore, if possible, use pre-training as often as possible: it is better to spend two hours (in total) on training, but save a lot of nerves and dozens of hours of future showdowns.