Where Difficult Employees Really Begin

Most leaders can point to at least one person in their organisation who feels harder to manage than they should be. Not because the work is complex, but because the behaviour is. The conversations are avoided, the tension builds quietly, and what should have been a small issue becomes something much heavier over time.

It is rarely a competence problem. More often, it is behaviour that sits just outside what is acceptable but not quite far enough to force immediate action. That grey zone is where organisations tend to hesitate. They hope it resolves itself, but it rarely does.

When things finally reach a point where action is unavoidable, the options are not particularly appealing. Formal performance management feels heavy and uncomfortable, even when it is necessary. Coaching can work, but it requires skill, consistency, and patience that not every manager has developed. By the time either approach is used, the situation has usually been allowed to drift for too long.

What is often missed is that these situations rarely begin as surprises. The signals are there early, sometimes even before the person joins. The real issue is not how organisations deal with difficult behaviour, but how they allow it in without realising the consequences.

Recruitment is usually treated as an exercise in assessment. A candidate sits across from you, and you try to determine whether they can do the job and whether they seem like a good fit. It feels logical, but it is also deeply flawed. You are making a high stakes decision based on a short interaction with someone who is highly motivated to present themselves in the best possible light.

What gets overlooked is that recruitment is not just about understanding the candidate. It is also about clearly showing them who you are as an organisation.

This is where many organisations fall short. They assume civil behaviour is obvious. They assume professionalism is shared and understood. They assume people will simply adapt once they arrive. Those assumptions are where future problems quietly take hold.

A far more effective approach is to make expectations explicit from the very beginning. Your code of conduct, or whatever you choose to call it, should not be buried in onboarding documents. It should sit at the centre of your recruitment process.

Before someone is hired, they should understand how people are expected to behave, how decisions are made, and what is valued in everyday interactions. They should have the opportunity to reflect on whether that environment suits them. This is not about filtering people out aggressively. It is about creating clarity, so neither side is relying on guesswork.

That clarity needs to continue once they start. The first day is not just about logistics and introductions. It is a chance to set a tone that will shape future conversations.

A simple but powerful step is an entry conversation that reinforces expectations in a human way. Something as straightforward as explaining that if behaviour drifts away from what has been discussed, it will be addressed openly, and that the same openness is expected in return. It creates a shared understanding that feedback is not a threat, but part of how the organisation operates.

Without that foundation, addressing behaviour later becomes far more difficult. None of this eliminates the need to deal with difficult behaviour. But it changes the starting point. Instead of reacting to problems, you are shaping the conditions that make those problems less likely to emerge in the first place.

Most organisations spend time trying to fix behaviour once it becomes visible. Far fewer invest the same effort in preventing it. That imbalance is what keeps the cycle going.

If you want fewer difficult conversations later, you need stronger ones earlier.

Better hiring decisions come from better evidence. Psychometric assessment helps you understand how candidates are likely to perform, not just how they present.

The focus of Fermion is "Psychometric Testing for Recruitment" and “Recruitment to Retention: How to Select Good Staff & Keep Them”. If you would like to learn how to select good staff and keep them, please contact us at Fermion.

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”

Eleanor Roosevelt.