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If you are a leader, chances are good that you have had at least one employee in your career who has caused you to lose sleep. Maybe the employee is frequently late, is participating in gossip or is making reoccurring mistakes. Our advice for difficult behaviors in employees is to train them, coach them and if that still doesn’t work, share them with a competitor.

When you address the issue appropriately, it may even shed light on a behavior that employee wasn’t aware that was an issue. Open up the lines of communication through the following actions:

Remain calm. If you have ever driven home from work saying, “Now, why did I say that?” chances are you may have regretted giving feedback to an employee when you were mad. If you are angry or emotional, postpone the discussion until you are feeling more in control. Remember, communication is permanent. Do not lose control of the discussion or say something that may later come back to haunt you.

Remain positive. Keep your thoughts positive. Help the employee identify what is causing the problem, and what the employee will do to help resolve the problem. Remember, the goal of this discussion is to make the employee more successful. Only in rare instances is an employee not willing to grow by changing negative behaviors.

Take immediate action. The longer you wait to confront a negative behavior, the harder it will be to change. It does not take long before the inappropriate behavior becomes a habit and habits are very hard to break. Once you have determined that a negative pattern of behavior exists, take action.

Give feedback privately. Prior to beginning the discussion, you should make sure that you have a private location to meet. Take steps to ward off any interruptions. If at all possible, hold the meeting one-on-one. Only in rare instances is a third party necessary. (If the employee is to be terminated or is unwilling to cooperate, you may need a third party, such as a union representative or a human resources representative.)

Be consistent. Do what you say you are going to do. If you tell employees you are going to do something if their inappropriate behavior does not change, stick to what you said. If employees do not feel you are going to take action, they may see no need to change.

Correct behaviors selectively. Do not use a correcting session to point out all the negative things that you have seen over time. If you coach properly, you should only be dealing with one or two inappropriate behaviors at a time. If you do not participate in ongoing communication with your employees, you may start to generate a laundry list of behaviors you want to discuss. The laundry list will have little impact and will likely get thrown out in the wash. Our general rule of thumb is, “If it’s more than two, they think it’s you.” Meaning, if you do bring out your long list of inappropriate behaviors, after about point five or six, the employee begins to think, “Why bother to even come to work? I must not be doing anything right. I never thought my boss liked me anyway. She’s always picking on me!”

While most behaviors can be improved, there are some employee issues that absolutely cannot be over looked and may even warrant termination. Some of these issues include violence, or threats of violence, and sexual harassment.

For most other employee problems, taking the above actions will help to get the employee back on track. However, if the employee is still struggling, you may need to sit down with him or her and discuss the behavior more thoroughly in a coaching discussion. Check back next Monday for a walk through of conducting an effective coaching discussion.

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Peter Barron Stark Companies is a nationally recognized management consulting firm that specializes in employee opinion surveys, executive coaching, and leadership and employee training. Send Peter Barron Stark Companies an email at info@peterstark.com for more information about how we can help you create an organization where your employees love to come to work and your customers love to do business.