Your Best Employee Is Getting Derailed By One Bad Relationship
You have an exceptionally high performer on your team. They’re amazing at what they do, someone you can just trust to get things done. They’re excellent at delivering and part of that is their ability to develop relationships with key partners and stakeholders to move things forward. In fact, they’re so good at what they do that they very rarely require much active management, just the occasional bit of support and encouragement here and there. Until now.
There’s one workplace relationship that just isn’t working for them. Something happened, you have no idea what the inciting event was, and the relationship has just deteriorated from there. They’ve gone from pushing work forward to spending a significant amount of time struggling with this relationship and asking for more and more support from you to get the problem resolved.
Resolving the problem, however, isn’t as simple as telling them to just get along and your high performer has had a role to play in this relationship deterioration too. But you need to do something before projects fall further behind and, worst case scenario: you lose your highest performer completely.
In this article, we’re going to look at how these relationship dynamics form, mistakes your high performer might be making and how to work with them to turn a difficult relationship around.
Workplace disagreements are inevitable, and being able to disagree productively is a highly important skill.
Why Workplace Relationships Break Down
I’m starting with this question because this is often part of what your high performer finds the most frustrating. If they’re usually very good at cultivating positive relationships, they are likely very confused by this deteriorating relationship because they haven’t behaved any differently. This can be particularly affecting and cause them to analyse their behaviour to work out where they went wrong or worry that they might repeat the same mistake in future.
This can be made even harder by the fact that there often isn’t a clear answer as to what went wrong. It could be as simple as your employee said something innocent that overlapped with something the other person felt insecure about on a particularly bad day. Or it could be as simple as a misunderstanding that led to a negative interpretation of your employee’s intent. Even if your high performer was a little awkward in their phrasing without realising, it could just be that the other person just didn’t have capacity to give them benefit of the doubt that day. The problem is that you probably won’t ever find out.
This is annoying because for someone who usually excels at relationships, they feel the need to find out the answer. And it might not just be your employee that’s frustrated by this. If you had the answer, you’d probably be able to better work out what is going on and fix it, but you’re in the same boat. For both of you, you have to start by accepting the uncomfortable: You often won’t be able to find out the original cause and you’re going to need to get okay with that in order to move forward.
But when it comes down to it, the initial cause isn’t as important as what happens next. A small upset usually isn’t too much to worry about, it’s a normal part of working life, but it’s when it becomes a pattern that the relationship starts to deteriorate.
What’s Actually Going On: Psychological Safety
The key to understanding what’s going on between your high performer and the individual is the concept of psychological safety. This idea isn’t just limited to workplace relationships, all relationships are affected by the state of psychological safety between those involved.
The people closest to you are usually people you have high levels of psychological safety with. It’s what enables people to be vulnerable with one another and to give each other the benefit of the doubt when someone says or does something unintentionally hurtful. High psychological safety means that when one person does make a faux par, the other usually assumes the intent was good regardless of the impact and that’s what enables challenges to be worked through and relationships to stay intact.
Closeness isn’t the only determinant of psychological safety though. It is very possible to share psychological safety with a complete stranger. We’ve all met someone who we think we’ll never see again and found ourselves opening up and allowing ourselves to be a bit more vulnerable in the conversation. When the other person doesn’t know us or anyone we know, it can feel safe to share information with them as we don’t need to worry about who they might tell.
It might be unintuitive to have a higher level of psychological safety between strangers but there are many things that go into these interpersonal dynamics.
New workplace relationships tend to have a baseline of psychological safety built in due to the shared goals of working together and that baseline can be built on. This is what enables your high performer to cultivate strong relationships as they build on this foundation. They’re adept at this kind of relationship building because they have a lot of experience with it. What they’re not so adept at, however, is navigating a relationship when psychological safety is starting from a lower point.
As we discussed in the last section, neither you nor your employee will likely find out why the other person has lower psychological safety with them, but that’s not really the important part. The key difference is that your employee is starting the relationship from a lower point of psychological safety than they’re used to working with.
This means that there is a different layer of interpretation going on in the relationship. Something clumsy that would have been given benefit of the doubt in a relationship with higher psychological safety can be interpreted as a slight, or a misunderstanding on their part could lead to them taking a negative interpretation of your employee’s intent. In this case, it doesn’t really matter what they said or did, it is how it was interpreted that is most significant.
However, this can easily become a vicious circle. Once the intent has been interpreted as negative, this then lowers the individual’s psychological safety further, prompting them to respond negatively in turn. This then lowers your employee’s psychological safety and the cycle continues, both parties feeling psychologically unsafe and making each other feel worse. It also makes both parties feel like the other person is to blame for their own worsening psychological safety.
Of course this spiral ends up making the situation larger than it is and a workplace interaction that usually didn’t take much of the day ends up consuming far more bandwidth than it should. Instead of pushing work forward, your employee is spending more time trying to manage the interactions or worrying about how much more it is likely to deteriorate.
Your high performer is now completely derailed by the bad relationship.
Being Direct Doesn’t Help
As a coach for neurodivergent leaders, I’m often witness to a pattern of how directness interacts in this scenario. In particular, many of my autistic clients prefer direct communication and so when the conversation starts to become challenging tend to focus on keeping their communication direct and to the point.
Now, in general I believe direct communication is hugely beneficial to the workplace and have spoken about this topic in previous articles, but in this one I want to focus on how directness can make a relationship that is already challenging significantly worse.
The instinct to become more direct when the relationship has suffered from misunderstanding or misreading of intentions seems intuitively like a good thing to do. The more ambiguity there is, the more space there is for this misunderstanding. However, the reality is less straightforward than intuition would have you believe.
As we’ve discussed, when the relationship is challenging, there is a lower level of psychological safety. This means that direct communication that is intended to remove ambiguity is interpreted as rude, defensive or dismissive due to a bias towards negative interpretations. This lowers psychological safety even further and fuels the vicious cycle even more.
That’s not to say that directness isn’t a valuable communication tool, but that it needs to be used within the context of the psychological safety in the relationship. If the psychological safety is already low, directness makes things worse, not better.
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Relationship Gone Wrong vs Bullying
Not all friction between employees is as a result of miscommunication or disagreements, sometimes the issue is just that someone is being bullied. However, it’s important to distinguish between the two situations because sometimes the situation can deteriorate so badly that it can feel like bullying without actually being bullying.
Of course bullying and relationship deterioration can overlap and it is not always obvious at a first glance what the situation actually is but it’s worth taking the time to understand whether the cause is relationship deterioration before jumping straight to bullying as an explanation.
ACAS describe bullying as unwanted behaviour from a person or group that is either:
Offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting
An abuse or misuse of power that undermines, humiliates, or causes physical or emotional harm to someone.
Some examples they give for bullying in the workplace are:
Constantly criticising someone’s work
Spreading malicious rumours about someone
Constantly putting someone down in meetings
Deliberately giving someone a heavier workload than everyone else
Excluding someone from team social events
Putting humiliating, offensive or threatening comments or photos on social media
I can’t tell you from this article whether the situation your employee is in is bullying or not. If they are being bullied, trying to work through the situation is unlikely to help and will require your direct involvement in following your company’s anti-bullying policy. However, just because they are feeling like a victim and are being emotionally impacted, does not mean it is automatically bullying.
You have likely seen many instances where both sides have accused the other of bullying due to the mental health impact of the deteriorated relationship. It is possible to turn these relationships around. I have helped many clients turn such situations into a positive working relationship, but it requires delicate work to acknowledge the employee’s concerns without dismissing them while simultaneously moving towards a productive resolution.
If you’re unsure whether the relationship is deteriorated or it’s bullying, look out for signs as given by ACAS, speak to others closer to the relationship to get indications of what might be going on (being sure to be careful in your approach not to create gossip or lead the conversation) and make use of your company’s HR support to help identify concerning behaviour.
Even if the situation is not direct bullying, it can still have a very real mental health effect on your employee so it is important to be sensitive to this when speaking with your employee and making sure that they have adequate mental health support through this situation. Losing your employee’s trust through inadequate care or losing them completely because of the mental health impact on the employee are both undesirable outcomes.
Why You’re Struggling To Solve It
It is natural for your employee to escalate when struggling with a challenging relationship when the relationship is having a severe impact on their mental health. Note here again that what we’re talking about in this case is a relationship gone wrong, not direct bullying.
The problem for you as their manager is that when you have investigated the situation, you usually end up seeing both sides of the disagreement. If both sides are accusing the other of damaging their wellbeing, there's no obvious perpetrator to admonish for their behaviour.
This is particularly frustrating for you as a manager. You’re on the receiving end of complaints, your high performer is expecting you to take action you neither agree with, nor think is the best outcome and this also puts a strain on the relationship between you and your direct report as well. If you do what they ask and admonish the other party for their behaviour then necessity dictates that you admonish your own employee as well and this approach is not going to make anyone involved feel satisfied, nor will it bring the tension to a resolution.
The mindset shift your employee needs to make is moving from “This is impacting my mental health so it’s your job to fix it” to “This is a situation that is challenging and I need support working out how we fix it.” While your employee’s mental health challenges are not their fault, they are their responsibility so they need to be an active participant in resolving the situation.
The willingness to be a part of the solution is the biggest determinant of success in the rebuilding of difficult relationships.
Your challenge then becomes to coach your employee from a state of victimhood to recognising their agency in the situation and their own capability to move things forward. Note that I say recognise their agency, not their fault. Your employee is in a state of low psychological safety and much like the original relationship, the relationship between you and your high performer has potential to deteriorate if not navigated carefully. This is not the place to make the employee aware of their contributions to the poor relationship, but rather to help them find a way forward.
Either you as their manager or your company’s HR can support them once they have willingness to actually improve the situation, but they need to have that willingness encouraged first.
How to Repair a Broken Workplace Relationship
So armed with the knowledge of how a relationship sours and what makes it worse, let’s tackle what to actually do about a bad workplace relationship, and how to get it back on track before your high performer takes their talents elsewhere.
An important thing to note is that your employee likely feels like they have been wronged in some way. It’s not unreasonable that the other party has likely been unfair at some point or has said something rude or offensive. Your high performer may well state that they need some form of acknowledgement from the company or the individual or an apology before they can move on. However, making moving forward conditional on this is unlikely to work. With low psychological safety on both sides, neither party is likely to admit fault and no progress can be made.
This idea will, of course, be met with resistance, but the important point is that you are not telling them to ignore it or let it go. You are advising them not to make it a prerequisite for moving the relationship forward.
Instead, to move forwards, the question they need to be able to answer is: What is the true outcome they want out of the relationship? While an apology might make them feel better in the short term, it doesn’t actually do anything to improve the relationship, particularly if the other person feels forced into making it. The reality is that the relationship had the opportunity to deteriorate because they had to work together and chances are they need to continue to work together to achieve the outcomes they need for their role. So really, the best outcome for their career and day to day work is to be able to get things done together without stress and drama.
Fortunately, this is likely the best outcome for the other person too. The work they need to collaborate on has not gone away, it’s just taken a performance impact instead. It would be a win for both parties to be able to continue this work.
This is a good thing because it means they have a shared purpose, something they both individually want to achieve. This means they have something they’re moving towards together and gives your employee a way to frame the relationship going forward. When approaching conversations with this person, they can ask the question: “How does what I want to say contribute to our shared purpose?” and if it doesn’t contribute, they need to let it go.
Keep in mind that even if they do have the same shared purpose, it doesn’t mean that they agree on the path to arrive there. This disagreement could even be what caused the relationship deterioration to begin with. But as long as they keep the shared purpose in mind, they can keep returning to it, agree on what they agree on and build from there.
The important thing to note is that both parties don’t need to agree on everything, they just need to find a starting point and build from there.
The same principle with regards to the shared purpose can be used to frame this conversation with your employee. Their resistance to this approach may well be because they believe they need an apology to move forward, however they likely have more important goals that they wish to accomplish. For example, if they are working on career progression, framing the conversation around how improving the relationship can support that goal is more likely to open up the conversation.
Note that the shared purpose between yourself and your employee need not be the same shared purpose as that of your employee and the individual they are struggling with.
It is important to realise for both yourself and your employee that you as an individual can only control one side of this situation, how you react, and if the other person refuses to join you in working towards the shared purpose, then that is the time to try outside involvement. Perhaps that does look like involving HR in the case of the difficult relationship or having a frank conversation with your employee about this part of their development if they are the one refusing to engage productively.
The difference is that no more time is allocated to complaining, only to moving things forward. The shared purpose can be adapted as the situation develops and more information comes to light, but requires all involved to be willing to collaborate on the shared purpose instead of falling back into complaining.
And if the worst comes to worst and the relationship cannot be resolved despite your employee’s best efforts to follow this approach, well at least they’re not going to be the one labelled as difficult in this situation. This does open up the avenue of performance management for the difficult employee while still supporting your own high performer.
This is One of the Hardest Management Situations There Is
Of course I do need to acknowledge that this article states the solution as if it’s simple, but just because it is simple, doesn’t mean it’s easy to implement. It can be very difficult emotionally to be caught up in these interactions, even as a manager not directly involved. It is identity shattering for your employee to be a high performer who gets on with people and feel like they’re no longer that person. It can be a real block for them to try and put aside the need for resolution and apology and prioritise moving forward instead. But that doesn’t mean it’s not necessary and they will need support to put this into place.
As their manager, it’s important to acknowledge that this is a road bump on an otherwise good working relationship and that support for your employee might not look like giving them what they request in this situation. Both of these things are difficult, but with the right approach and prioritisation of the shared purpose, the working relationship between yourself and your high performer can come out stronger with a higher level of trust as well.
The earlier you or your employee can spot the signs of relationship difficulties and put these strategies into place, the easier it is to improve the relationship before things really deteriorate. But sometimes we miss the early signs and need to build back from a relationship that has completely fallen apart.
I have a whole suite of relationship navigation frameworks developed from leadership research, lived experience as a neurodivergent leader and experience coaching over 40 neurodivergent leaders from individual contributors progressing into management for the first time to heads of department and C-Suite.
As a specialist in working through challenging relationships, I am able to support employees and managers with direct coaching on this topic, as well as education to wider teams and departments on the intricacies of challenging workplace relationships. If you would be interested in support for your company, get in touch to discuss how we could best work together.
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