Negative People Are a Challenge to Your Leadership Skills

Negative people in your team can cause untold damage to the motivation of the rest of your people. Their negativity is like a virus and can undermine all your attempts to improve various aspects of work life such as safety, quality, productivity and training. For every positive thing that you say, they have a negative answer. For example, in a team meeting you might want to talk about progress that's been made in developing a safer workplace. The negative person will either dismiss the results or suggest that they are incorrect. This leaves the rest of the team with doubt in their mind that they have actually achieved anything. One of the ways of avoiding situations like this where your ability to give positive reinforcement is being undermined, is to set meeting rules which include only positive comments being acceptable.

The problem you are faced with is that most negative people are quite persuasive and eloquent when they are being pessimistic. There are many ways of dealing with the negative person. But before you launch into a program to handle this person, there are a number of things to remember. The first thing to avoid is the confrontation and the attempt to persuade them that they are wrong. From a leadership perspective, is quite tempting to placate the person by agreeing with them. If you do this, you will lose the opportunity to introduce change because you have endorsed their opinion. It is also best to avoid a solution to the problem because this will give them a further opportunity to pour cold water on to the situation.

When you have a negative person in your team, it will test your leadership capacity for thought and creativity. The principles are quite simple, don't confront, don't try and persuade, and don't suggest alternative solutions. Okay, this leaves you plenty of opportunities to take an alternative approach. One of the better ways of dealing with negativity, especially in the group setting, is to ask them for solutions. This means that they have to engage their brains in the problem rather than just pointing out that it won't work.

Part of your leadership development is to understand the motives behind behavior. This can be tough, especially with negative people. You will find that most pessimists believe that they have no control over the future. Their lives are directed by things that are a long way outside their control and they have no power. If you have a person like this in your team, it is very difficult to control their effect on the other people. Sometimes, they have no idea of the negative effect they are having on the rest of the team. If this is the case, gently suggest to them that they should examine their comments before they make them and discard anything that has a hint of pessimism about it. Explain the effect they are having and offer to help them balance their pessimism by demonstrating the control they do have over the future.