How do you manage an employee you don’t like?

While it may be your job to motivate and inspire everyone on your team, it can be difficult to like and respect every employee.

From the first moment you are introduced, you unconsciously begin to form opinions and bias towards a person – and sometimes negative feelings can creep through and impact your ability to form positive working relationships.

Most managers will avoid forming friendships with specific workers and will instead maintain professional courtesies with everyone. However, even with our best intentions in play, unconscious bias can occur and affect relationships with your staff.

When you discover there is someone in your team that consistently gets on your nerves, you may be wondering if there is any way you can continue to fairly manage and lead this person.

Fortunately, there are a number managerial and assertiveness skills you can use to ensure you and your team can work together effectively, regardless of your feelings towards each other.

Embrace your differences

If you find yourself continually disagreeing with someone, you can actually use it to your advantage. Having access to a person who constantly challenges your views and provokes passion should help inspire looking at things in a different way.

This can also help motivate you to approach problems from new and fresh angles to help boost innovation and productivity.

Focus inward

Under the right management style, the employee you have an issue with will remain pleasantly unaware of your animosity towards them.

This is because any perceived problems you have are created by yourself. If you are working with someone you don’t like, take the chance to look at your own choices to discover why you might have an issue with this person. In doing so, you could potentially uncover an opportunity in the way you handle your frustrations or tackle problems.

Once you have identified the reasons behind your dislike of a person, you can work on ways to improve yourself – potentially enhancing your work ethic and managerial skills.