Recalcitrant Employees : What Do You Do With a Worker Nobody Wants Around Anymore, but One You Can’t Fire?

At first, the powers that be wanted Daryl Gates to quit and he wouldn’t. Then he said he would. Then he said he wouldn’t, again. Then he said he was only bluffing about saying he wouldn’t. Then he said he was bluffing about bluffing.

He also found time to write a book and appear on “Donahue” to snipe at his detractors.

All of which unhinged City Hall politicos. What do you do, they wondered, with an employee nobody wants around anymore, but one you can’t fire?

It’s a dilemma that bosses grapple with regularly. Sacking a problem employee--even one who doesn’t enjoy the special job protection of L.A.’s police chief--isn’t necessarily a snap.

In some circles, recalcitrant workers even have a name: Employees From Hell.

Executives at a Los Angeles electronics company, for instance, are afraid to fire one manager who acts deranged at work and once held his wife hostage at home. They’re fearful he’ll hunt down and shoot the CEO in retaliation.

Other supervisors grouse about underlings who never bathe, who constantly insult co-workers or who are so annoying that colleagues would rather set themselves on fire than hear another word. Fear of lawsuits motivates most employers to hang onto such people, say the bosses involved.

“Unfortunately, it’s illegal to fire someone for being a jerk,” complains one frustrated manager.

But experts say there are ways to live with, change and sometimes get rid of unwieldy employees. Among the methods: The Vault, Coupons, Ethical Persuasion. And the Two Brunos’ Knitting Needles.

Many corporations transfer troublesome senior employees to remote cities or promote them to “assistant to the president” with an office in the basement, says Richard Oliva, a former vice president with Mitsubishi Electric and Exxon Enterprises.

At one department store chain, the place for misfits is known simply as “the vault,” an isolated outpost never visited by customers or other workers. “Once they’re in there, they can’t hurt anybody,” says Mary-Kay Shaver, a former personnel supervisor for the company.

Often, the goal is to avoid unfounded lawsuits for age, race or sex discrimination, Oliva says: “It’s far easier to pay someone a salary (to do nothing) than to spend perhaps 10 times that salary in legal fees (and endure) the negative publicity of a lawsuit.”

But shipping employees to corporate limbo sometimes damages other workers’ morale, experts warn. And in the case of the electronics company and its seemingly deranged manager, such a strategy is potentially lethal.

Company honchos who moved the employee to a rarely used building out back didn’t necessarily solve the problem, says management consultant Linda Hirshberg of San Diego.

The guy could still show up someday at the main office with a gun, says Hirshberg, who counseled General Dynamics employees after an office shooting there earlier this year. If the worker truly is unbalanced, the company should bring in psychologists to deal with the situation, she says: “It almost never pays to avoid a problem.”

Few Employees From Hell, however, require such drastic measures.

Hirshberg used coupons to tame one loud, abrasive employee whose incessant harping about management pushed co-workers to the edge.

Every time the man wanted to complain, he had to redeem a coupon. As his allotment dwindled, he learned to parcel out his grumblings, she says.

The cure wasn’t 100% effective, Hirshberg says, but it took the edge off an irritating situation. If bosses can’t remake an employee’s personality, they at least can manage it differently, she says: “If you change the way you do business with these people, you change the business. . . . The place to look is at yourself.”

Well, sometimes.

That wouldn’t have worked with the Employee Who Smelled Like Hell. “The wind must have been blowing the other way when they hired him,” shrugs the man’s ex-manager, who asked for anonymity to avoid embarrassing anyone involved.

Supervisors eventually sent the employee to a doctor to check for a medical cause. When such was not found, he underwent six months of counseling and company monitoring, which cleaned him up.

In other cases, warnings and counseling are in vain.

A child-care center supervisor in Northern California recalls an employee whose personal life constantly spilled over into work: “She was like a tornado of crises”--crying at her desk, borrowing money from colleagues, quarreling with her boyfriend in the halls, taking time off to rescue relatives whose cars broke down in New Mexico. “It really got old after a while.”

Several times, the supervisor called the woman in to discuss the disruptions and “she would do well for a time.” But the problems resumed.

Finally, co-workers stopped playing into the sympathy game, the supervisor says: “Nobody was giving her any feedback. . . . We made her real uncomfortable.”

Without an audience, the woman quit.

Making wayward employees miserable is a common management tactic. Weird hours, extra supervision and menial duties are a few methods that can induce resignations.

Psychiatrist Tom Rusk recommends a less-underhanded method he calls “ethical persuasion.”

Bosses gain “tremendous political power,” the San Diego psychiatrist says, if they treat underlings with unfailing fairness and respect.

A sample scenario: Call in the employee and say, “Bob, I’ve got a problem and you’re the only person who can help me.” Then, without arguing or defending, listen to the employee’s “perhaps bizarre, outrageous view” of the situation and rephrase it “until you amaze (the employee) with how well you understand his point of view.”

Next it’s the boss’s turn to detail the problem, frequently stopping to make sure the employee understands everything and feels the session is proceeding with fairness and respect. Bold bosses might even tape-record the conversation and give a copy to the employee to document their efforts.

Lastly, the boss asks the employee to recommend solutions. “It’s very important to have them think about it a couple of days,” Rusk says. If no satisfactory answer arises, neutral arbitration or counseling might be tried.

“The power is that you’re being profoundly respectful,” he says. The employee--”unless you’re dealing with a reptile or a Manson”--has little choice but “to join you on that high moral ground.”

Rusk concedes some limitations to his method. For one, few companies behave ethically enough to exert true moral leverage, he says. If the top boss makes millions as the company bleeds and its jobs vanish, how can management expect anything reasonable from employees? he asks.

Or, for that matter, can a scandal-tainted Los Angeles mayor demand a controversial police chief’s head?

Maybe not, but that doesn’t immunize Gates--whose official retirement date now is Sunday--from the power of moral leverage, Rusk insists: “If we can get rid of a President of the United States. . . . “

If city leaders sponsored a no-confidence vote, and Gates lost by a huge margin, he’d be hard-pressed to stay in office, Rusk says. Another option might have been to strip the police department’s funding and start another force, he says.

But such solutions require politicians willing to put their own careers on the line, Rusk notes.

Finally, there’s always the knitting-needle method, as explained by humorist Dave Barry in his book “Claw Your Way to the Top”:

“There is no good way to fire an employee, but there are some things you can do to make it easier. You can have compassion. You can have understanding. You can have two large security guards named Bruno standing next to you and holding hot knitting needles.

“Call the employee in and say, ‘Ted, your performance has been unsatisfactory, so I’m afraid these two Brunos are going to have to poke out your eyes with hot knitting needles. I hate to do this, but the only alternative is to fire you.’

“At this point, Ted will beg you to fire him. He may well confess to the Lindbergh baby kidnaping.”