BY PATRICK KENDRICK
As a former special operations technician, I try to categorize and assess my day-to-day work environment as I would an unknown hazardous material compound so that I can figure a better way to deal with it. That includes employees. As a chief officer, manager, or supervisor, we’ve all had to work with the sullen, often angry, disconsolate subordinate or co-worker whom I affectionately refer to as the “radioactive” employee. I use this term because the only way to deal with this type of person is the same way you would deal with radioactive hazardous materials: Give them time, distance, and shielding.
The radioactive employees are the people who consistently create problems not only with you, their supervisor, but with just about everyone they work with, sooner or later. Like victims of radiation poisoning, they are scarred and, at least metaphorically, dying inside as surely as if they had been exposed to some debilitating or lethal chemical. The difference is that their scarring is mental and emotional and if nothing is done to intervene, it can be just as harmful to them and their co-workers as a contagious physical malady. And, they can spread their acquired disease like an Ebola virus. They spout their discontent for the organization and its leaders like Patrick Henry giving a rallying oratory. Soon enough, their hateful rhetoric takes hold like the anarchist seeds of a prison riot. The next thing you know, you walk into a station with a benevolent greeting for your faithful troops and you’re met with an eerily quiet greeting, icy stares, and conspiratorial whispers or an all-out slugfest of accusatory outbursts. The problem is, we’re not priests sent here to save souls. We’re officers in an organization tasked with running our department as smoothly as possible; keeping our personnel safe; and at least trying to provide an environment that is structured, professional, and hopefully welcoming not only to our outside customers, the tax-paying public, but also to our internal customers, our fellow firefighters, especially those poor voiceless souls who’ve just joined our brotherhood. Like baby ducklings, the probationary employees will follow whichever lead to which they are first exposed. If it is a bad lead cast by a radioactive employee, then the probie will undoubtedly be off to a bad start. Remember, first impressions are the ones that linger.
Allowing one of these radioactive employees to spread his disgruntled hatred among his co-workers is as irresponsible as watching your favorite TV sitcom while the back half of the station burns down. Simply, you can’t do it. Yet, most of us do. Why? Because we don’t know how to deal with them. We are trained to deal with emergencies of just about every type, size, and origin. But, we are not trained to deal with these unfortunate individuals whose careers have taken a dramatically wrong turn. Like the police chief’s son who ends up in jail or the preacher’s daughter who ends up an exotic dancer, we can’t comprehend how they wound up that way or what we can do to bring them back to the family, but we have to try. Again, you wonder, why? Because, and I truly believe this, every one of those radioactive employees was once a bright-eyed young professional who took this job because of one thing: They wanted to help people. Each has his own story. If you take the time to look for it, they have something to offer in their present and, hopefully, future capacity. To add practicality to that bit of altruistic thinking, they also took a long time to train, and it cost a lot of money to get them where they could perform successfully out in the streets and in the homes of our citizens. To ignore all that and write them off is not only an injustice to them but a costly managerial and operational error to your organization.
I’ve seen these employees throughout my career. Although I can’t say I have always had success turning them aroundthey have to do that themselvesI can at least point out how to recognize them and offer suggestions on how to deal with them and, with any luck, get them turned back around to the positive employees they once were. You have nothing to lose except your own self-worth if you don’t give them another chance.
WHAT CAUSED THIS TO HAPPEN?
How did this employee become radioactive? What happened to cause this once bright and energetic professional filled with so much promise to become this empty husk filled only with disdain and loathing for himself and others? There can be a number of causes, but here are the top qualifiers.
• Being passed over for a promotion. Undoubtedly, the number-one cause of radioactive employees is being passed over for a promotion. If you are a career firefighter who has gone through the trouble of taking the right classes academically and technically, studying for the tests, and stepping up into the role, you are the type of person who is looking forward to exercising your experience and education in your first (or next) role as an officer. To have that taken away can be devastating and can adversely affect the rest of your career. It can be embarrassing, especially in the fire service, which seems to be a breeding ground for competitive people with wicked (if not always tasteful) senses of humor and sometimes well-meaning, but not well-received, practical jokes and one-liners.
I can recall an instance where one lieutenant was demoted because of a lack of a mandatory educational requirement. It didn’t take 24 hours for the jokesters to realize the ex-lieutenant drove a Ford XLT truck. The first day after his demotion, as soon as he walked into the station, one of his co-workers quipped, “Hey, you know what that XLT stands for? X-LT. Get it? Ha-ha.” How do you think that went over? No one ever said we hire only sensitive individuals.
I’ve known people passed over for positions from lieutenant to chief, and I know few people who take it well. Even if the individual didn’t truly desire the position, it’s difficult not to take it personally if you get passed over. Simply put, being passed over says this: “You were not good enough.” Some people translate that further into “and we don’t like you.” You can imagine how tough that is to take. How can you feel good about yourself after that? How do you get back on track?
I know from personal experience, too. I have also been passed over for promotions for a variety of reasons: I’ve been on promotional lists that expired before I was chosen. In some cases, I wasn’t as prepared for the tests as I could have been. And, I’ve also been a victim of poor promotional processes or seedy politics and backroom deals. (Yes, Virginia, that still happens in this day and age.) So, I’ve been radioactive myself to the point of glowing in the dark, and I know how it feels. However, I’ve always been able to look back on it, pick myself up, brush myself off, and move on. And, the best way to do that, I’ve found, is to get busy polishing your resume by taking the next step educationally. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The employee who has been passed over for promotion now begins to doubt himself, and that can extend into other areas of life, personally and professionally. He may begin to doubt his ability to handle emergencies. He may bring this self-doubt home, and this radioactivity may lead to marriage problems or substance abuse. One thing exacerbates another until you have an individual filled with self-loathing and the painful repetitiveness of, “What if I would have done this instead of that?” and other negative thoughts. Pretty soon, the Geiger counter goes off whenever this employee enters the station. Now, you’ve got a problem as a supervisor, because it is very difficult to remotivate someone who was once self-motivated and then lost his mojo.
• A disagreement with a co-worker. Disagreements among personnel can lead to two radioactive employees if not handled correctly. It’s like the wife who is being publicly abused by her husband, causing a well-meaning hero to step in to help her. She then turns on the hero and beats him with her purse. Sometimes, employees don’t want intervention from the manager, but, as any contemporary manager knows, if you don’t intervene, you may be opening yourself and the department up to potential legal liability and the loss of one or both employees. This is where you really have to be fair and consistent, because if either party perceives that you are not being impartial, both will focus their anger on you, their supervisor, instead of on each other.
The cause of the disagreements might be quite petty, such as fighting over the TV remote or whose turn it was to wash the dishes (both true incidents). Usually, the argument is the result of one of the employee’s being a tad radioactive to begin with. Something sets him off; the next thing you know, you have a nuclear incident within the station.
Of course, if they are fighting, the employees will have to be separated. If their confrontation has become physical, you will have to notify law enforcement and call your Risk Management Department and your chief. If an employee is injured, he must be medically assessed and must complete injury forms. A disciplinary or corrective program will have to be initiated for one or both employees; thus, the labor union will usually want to get involved. Because these types of incidents involve more than one person, they are not well-kept secrets. So, if the Labor Board wants to get involved as representatives for the employees, let them. It is best if they understand the process, and if termination is unavoidable, the employees should know how that decision was made.
More often than not, no matter how the supervisor handles the situation, one of the employees will feel that he has been slighted, and the radiation begins. Often, these employees begin to have increased incidents of disagreements, almost as if they are looking for at least one argument that they can win or come out on top of, and it becomes cyclical. Sometimes, once the “radiation” has set in, the employee begins to take the disgruntled persona out in public, and you begin to get increased complaints from citizens. Now, you have real problems, because some of these citizens take the time to call the city manager or the mayor, and what began as a conflict over something petty has now given the whole department a black eye in terms of public relations. The more expedient these situations are handled, the better.
• Burnout from too many medical calls or one or more critical incidents and personal problems. Personal problems (such as failed marriages or family problems, substance abuse, or financial problems) as well as burnout and reactions to critical stress incidents are not exclusive to fire departments. They are common in law enforcement agencies from local municipalities to large federal organizations. Certainly, all the branches of the armed forces are familiar with these problems. Private sector organizations are not immune to these problems, either. But, in the fire service, we are all sensitized to these problems with repeated classes, seminars, memos, and directives that point out that we should be aware of these problems, stay vigilant as supervisors and co-workers, and be prepared to intervene in cases where our personnel are affected by these problems. And we don’t. The reason? As any expert on behavior modification knows, when you are exposed to the same sensory information repeatedly, you desensitize yourself to that material. So, the very material that is supposed to make you more sensitive to these problems presents the conundrum of disabling you from being sensitive to the problem. The people suffering from these problems are aware that they existthey saw (again) the mandated video that was shown (again) at the community center and they walked out at the end (again) muttering to themselves, “Man, there are a lot of messed-up people out there.” But, they don’t quite make the connection that they might be among the “messed-up people.”
I’m not sure I have the definitive answer for employees whose radioactivity has resulted from these conditions other than to say that we must still be on the lookout for those telltale signs of what is happening to that individual whose life is deteriorating. We are here to help people, and that should include our own. Someone close to them should offer a shoulder to lean on and suggest counseling or an employee assistance program. Most will not listen to a supervisor at this point, so the suggestions must come from someone closer to them, a friend or a company officer whom they respect.
• Poor labor-management decisions or negotiations. This seems to be the one cause that can produce several, even numerous, radioactive employees all at once and can change the environment from amicable tolerance to outright anarchy. The theory for cause is based on relative deprivation, a notion suggested by Alexis de Tocqueville in his meditations on the French Revolution, and volumes of information have been written on this subject. Briefly, relative deprivation is the common belief by a group of people, whether valid or not, that they are being deprived of something to which they think they are entitled. The phenomenon is further explained by political scientist J.C. Davies’ J-curve theory of revolution, which states “that a widening gap between what people want and what they get leads to a revolutionary situation.” The wider the gap between what they have and what they perceive they should have causes increasing animosity toward those who are not giving them what they want.
Although we don’t have employees storming the station with torches and burning effigies, at times we do have groups of disgruntled employees demanding what they believe they are entitled to, and this can cause friction in the stations and can spawn more radioactive employees. Whether sliding pay scales or incentives that favor veteran employees and exclude newer employees or favor newer employees and exclude veteran employees, policies based on short-sighted goals rather than long-term organizational management, contract articles that change working conditions to staffing adjustments and educational requirements to varying uniform standards, nothing upsets people in labor or management more than the ill-named “labor-management negotiations.” Personnel on both sides of the fence are constantly up in arms or eerily cautious. People you were talking to yesterday about the kids, the weather, and the price of gas today won’t tell you what the temperature is. Downstairs, they know everything you are trying to do to them, and they don’t like it. Upstairs, they feel like we are giving away the farm, and they don’t like it. Everyone is acting as if they’ve been sleeping on a bed of nails with a scratchy wool blanket, and the radioactivity readings are higher than a Nevada nuclear test site. Still, we all persist in our roles of us against them instead of sitting down together throughout the year with interest-based bargaining and discussing mutual needs, explaining budget concerns and restrictions, and working to overcome operational problems. And in the meantime, the radioactive employees multiply exponentially.
So, in some cases, we create these unfortunate souls. And at other times, they are completely self-made. In the end, they still have to be dealt with for their own benefit as well as that of their co-workers. How can we do that? As I mentioned earlier, you must handle them like radioactive materials, with time, distance, and shielding.
HOW TO DEAL WITH SUCH EMPLOYEES
• Time. Give the employee time to mourn the loss. If he is despondent over a lost promotion, he will need time to reflect on it and to realize it is not the end of the world and time to rebuild his self-esteem. Give him projects, something small with a high probability of success. Perhaps he has children, and you can get him interested in a public education program that benefits kids. Maybe you have some training programs that need polishing, policies that need rewriting, prefire plans that need to be revamped, or logistics that need to be filled. Whatever the project, you have to give the radioactive employee time to think about it, time to accept it as his project, and time to buy in. But, he has to buy in on his own terms. He has to believe that he is the only person who can lend quality to this project; you have to help him believe that. In the end, you might have a project completed and an employee who feels better about himself. Time is the crucial element here; the length of time varies according to the individual.
This can be applied to those two feuding firefighters as well. They need time to cool off, time to realize how foolish their disagreement was, and time to develop coping mechanisms to control their tempers. Some people carry grudges, but most people cannot carry anger for very long. Still, you have to provide them that time away from each other and the environment that contributed to the problem. Maybe you can get them interested in a wellness program, something to help vent their frustrations and get some positive endorphins flowing. Maybe you can invite them to work out with you. People often drop their guard when they see their stuffy supervisor huffing under a barbell or struggling breathlessly against the stair machine. I’ve found people tend to open up while they’re working out; this might be an opportunity to find an underlying problem that set them off in the first place. Even if you can’t fix it for them, you can point them in the right direction if you know where the source of their anger is coming from. But it all takes time.
Those employees who feel they were wronged during negotiations need time to look around and assess what are real and what are perceived losses; they need time to realize the grass is not always greener at other places and they are at their chosen department because they made a commitment to their particular community, and it isn’t just another job with one-way benefits. There’s a reason they call it public service; they need time to remember that. Encourage them to become part of the negotiating team so that their voice can be heard the next time contract time rolls around. Maybe they’ll learn from the experience; either way, they’ll understand the process better. Understanding is key to tolerance.
Those employees enduring personal problems need time, some of which may have to be away from the job until they can get a handle on their problems. Leaves of absence or leaves taken under the Family Medical Leave Act may permit these individuals the time to get the care they need from employee assistance programs or rehabilitation centers.
• Distance. The radioactive employee will need distance as welldistance from the co-worker with whom he had the problem and from the problem that began the employee’s deterioration. Perhaps the employees are at your busiest station and they need distance from that grind. They might need distance from the hubbub of the gossip mill, the second guessing of co-workers, or the erroneous flood of misinformation that poor labor-management negotiations can bring. If any of this is the case, they should be moved to an outside station (if station bids don’t preclude you from doing so).
Often, a change of venue, pace, or co-workers can reignite a radioactive employee’s interest in the job. Give him distance from what he ordinarily does. A change of pace or space, just like a vacation, often removes you from the problem and gives you a needed respite and a new look at a problem that, on introspection, might not seem like such a significant problem after all.
More drastically, a shift change may be something to consider, but be careful here. You don’t want to give the impression that you’re dumping this “problem” employee. Talk to the employee first. Offer the shift change as an option. Explain the value of a new outlook. This distance, no matter how slight, might be just the thing to pull the employee back in and make him productive again.
• Shielding. This applies to shielding from gossip about employee personal or professional problems or the constant reminder of the division between labor and management. Shield them from reality for awhile. I’m not suggesting you place them in a make-believe world, but shield them from the sameness, the repetitiveness that may have contributed to their problems in the first place. Maybe they are at your main or central station, where news travels faster than a falling star and the jokes, jeers, and cajoling over a lost promotion or disciplinary decision are too close. Rumors fly like bats around a fire station, and the radioactive employee may ask you about what you have heard or, more defensively, what is being said about him. This is where a supervisor may have to play dumb. Like the old adage says, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” No one likes his nose rubbed in his defeat, so there is no sense adding to the misery. Your shielding from the cold, hard truth might enable this employee to recover just enough self-esteem to begin again.
This is a good time to say, “No, I haven’t heard anything negative, but I was thinking about you the other day when the chief mentioned he wanted to start a new public education project and asked me to find some qualified volunteers.” Shore up this individual’s strength; minimize his negative attributes. This employee can be saved or “unradiated,” if you will. You need to do whatever it takes to help him. After all, employees are a fire department’s biggest investment, and you need to try to make them last. One thing I’ve never understood is why we put so much time and effort into protecting assets, facilities, equipment, and apparatus when our most valuable assetsour employeesare often left to take care of themselves, to develop their own careers, and to fix their problems on their own when, in most cases, we have the ability to assist them.
Finally, if all else fails, these people may need time, distance, and shielding from the job. A leave of absence might be the only thing that can deactivate radioactive employees. You owe them your best effort in trying to help them, but you must also keep in mind “radiation poisoning” can spread. If you allow it to go unchecked, you will end up with another radioactive employee, then another. Keep your Geiger counter (and your common sense) close by, and good luck.
PATRICK KENDRICK has been a battalion chief with Tamarac (FL) Fire Rescue for almost 12 years. He previously served for 14 years with the West Palm Beach (FL) Fire Department. He is enrolled in the National Fire Academy Executive Fire Officer Program and has written on fire service-related and other topics in fire service publications and the general press. His first novel, Papa’s Problem, is scheduled for publication this fall.
