Employee's bad attitude is actually bad behavior

I wish I had a dollar for every time an employer said "This employee has a bad attitude!" The next question is often "Can I fire him?"

No one has ever been fired for a bad attitude. Sure, attitude may be the reason given, but the real reason was poor behavior. We cannot know another person's attitude (whatever that is) but you can observe and act on behaviors.

Employers and employees need to understand the difference. The fastest way to change "attitude" is to identify and change behaviors.

Take this example. An employer might say: "You showed a bad attitude to customers again today and I'm going to fire you the next time it happens." OK. I hope you feel better now, Ms. Manager, but you gave the employee very little to help him or her improve, to explain what went wrong and to help the employee understand how the customer sees things.

What if Ms. Manager said: "Today, I saw another serious problem with your customer service. When there was no receipt for their gift return, you turned away, went in the back without explanation, offered store credit rather than the requested refund, pointed at the sign about receipts and offered a blank stare. The customer repeated it was a gift, they had no receipt and they did not want another product. The customer became angry, asked to see a manager and I resolved the problem. This is how you should have handled the issue ..."

This explanation does three important things. The employee is retrained on how to handle gift returns, told how important good service is to the business and told what happens if this continues. It will not guarantee behavioral improvement, but it sure will make future discipline or discharge fairer and more easily defended. If the discharge comes, it will be due to poor customer service, not a bad attitude.

Employees on the receiving end of bad-attitude discussions now have a way to interpret Ms. Manager's bungled conversation. It's not your attitude - it's your behaviors! Your attitude may have felt just fine to you, and there might even be a policy or pattern that supported what you did (like the return receipt rule). What you failed to think about (or maybe you did) is that the words chosen, the body language used and the voice you chose represented your "attitude" to others. You are in control of your behaviors.

Employers should also know that cultural differences might seem like a bad attitude, such as failure to look at someone in the eye or other nonverbal clues. Help the employee understand how the behavior is perceived by other cultures and why it should be modified at work (religious needs are a different issue).

The old saying goes: Thoughts lead to words, words lead to actions, and actions lead to habits. Focus on behaviors to solve "attitude" problems. The next time you see or show a "bad attitude," identify the behaviors involved and how they can be changed.