‘Tyranny of the Majority’ and Problem Employees

With the onslaught of recent layoffs, a standstill of business growth in Los Angeles County and the onset of a recession nationwide, managers are facing increasing pressures in juggling the challenges posed by today’s workplace.

Among the more difficult personnel questions often facing managers is: Do you fire a talented employee if a majority of your staff wants you to? Do you allow staff to “vote out” the least popular member?

Three times in my professional career I have faced this dilemma. Three times I have refused to bow to what I saw as “tyranny of the majority.”

In each instance, I have been urged--by staff and superiors--to recognize that the will of the majority is the “collective good” and should be respected.

In each instance, I have agreed that a problem exists when an individual cannot deal successfully with a majority of his or her colleagues and peers.

Yet what is the responsibility of a manager in this instance?

Perhaps it is to help identify the problem and its causes and to work with the individual to help him relate more successfully with work associates.

Perhaps it is to explain to the problem employee that he may not be aware of the “wake” he is leaving behind, may not be aware of the consequences of his words and actions.

It may even be necessary to create an intervention, where the problem employee and those whom he has negatively affected are brought together, so he can hear the problem directly from their mouths.

If the employee has truly unique value, special help may be in order to try to coach him, to help improve his interactions.

Conversely, sometimes the solution may be to create a situation in which less work interaction with colleagues is necessary. There are, after all, some good employees who happen to be loners.

Not every good employee can or should win a staff popularity contest.

As a manager, you will have to devote more than the usual amount of time to monitoring this employee, and only you can decide whether the investment is worth making.

I used to have a problem employee whose worth to the corporation needed to be weighed against her downside on an almost daily basis.

In the end, truly dysfunctional behavior must change. And unless we live and work on islands, some successful interaction with other employees is necessary to perform almost any job.

But it is simply unethical for a manager to cave in to primitive tribal emotion and to run a company or a division or a unit on the personal popularity of each individual.

Shakespeare’s Falstaff may think of honor as a “mere scutcheon,” but the way we choose to deal with problem employees says more about us as managers than about the difficult employee.

Life is about more than a TV game called “Survivor.”

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Jim Russell is the general manager of public radio’s Marketplace Productions in Los Angeles. E-mail: jrussell@marketplace.org.