Author: Jonathan & Erik Bernstein

[Editor’s note: We all know that one person in the office who, despite being solid at their job, is a constant problem in the office. Left unchecked, these types of personalities can cause drops in productivity or even draw negative attention from stakeholders by doing things like agitating coworkers, creating stirs among customers, and generally disrupting day-to-day operations. This guest post from the ManagerSkills blog explores a few of the most common types of difficult employees and offers some tactics to keep their tendencies from becoming major problems.]

Ah, the difficult employee: the person that makes driving to work feel like waiting for someone to stab you with a pin needle over and over. Some of you may feel this sentiment is too strong, while some of you may feel like it’s not strong enough.

Everyone has that one person on their team that they feel like has a God-given ability to make your life miserable – an implied arch nemesis – if you will. The good news is that you aren’t helpless and we’re going to discuss a few strategies to be victorious over this villain in your life.

Before diving into the fix, let’s start with identifying three prominent personalities that can define difficult people. Although there may be others, these three seem to be prevalent in any context.

The Debbie Downer

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We’ll name the first personality Debbie Downer. As you can tell by the name, this person is dominated by Negativity Bias. Negativity Bias is the tendency for people to focus more on negative elements of situations rather than positive elements. Moreover, they only focus on problems, rather than solutions.

It seems like they see the proverbial cup as half-empty 99.9% of the time and are dumbfounded when asked to come up with a way to fix it as if you were asking them to change the rotational direction of the earth.

So, how do you deal with the Debbie Downer? As always, positivity is your best friend, but in your interactions with this person, it is even more important to keep your positive cap on. If the rest of your team sees you being negatively affected, then they will follow suit.

One strategy is to sit down and have a completely honest discussion about how their negativity is affecting the team. Use recent examples if you have them, and if you don’t, talk about how it’s affecting potential results. Tell them that for every negative comment, they must make three positive comments or constructive solutions.

The Drama Queen

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The second personality is the Drama Queen. The Drama Queen also suffers from negativity bias, but takes it to a whole other level. They see a small problem or ambiguous situation and turn it into a shipwreck! They thrive on emotional situations and love conflict. They might argue with you just for the fun of it.

If someone looks at them in a slightly different way, they’re by the water cooler making up a story. If the CEO sends an E-mail with just one ambiguous word, they are spreading rumors about how the company is not doing well.

Similarly to the Debbie Downer, it’s important to be honest about how the Drama Queen’s behavior is impacting the team. There’s no shortage of impact when it comes to the Drama Queen, but productivity and morale might be the best factors to broach. Let’s take an example.

Say, Deena is your Administrative Assistant and goes to HR and says she doesn’t feel recognized enough. Now, you as the manager know that you recognize Deena ALL of the time, but have been busy for the last week with a demanding project. Why did Deena feel the need to take this concern elsewhere? You feel like you must have missed something.

The reality is that even if you recognized her 10 times that week but she did 11 things, she still would feel under-recognized. People who suffer from Debbie Downer syndrome tend to also have low self-esteem and like to draw attention to themselves or shed negative light on others.

In the case of Deena, it might be a plausible solution to sit her down and let her know that you do recognize her hard work, but aren’t able to recognize her at every junction. Going forward, you would appreciate that you bring those concerns directly to you so that you can come up with a constructive solution together.

The Underminer

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The third personality is Underminer. The Underminer (let’s call him Paul) thinks they are the smartest person in the room at all times, and like to make sure everyone knows it. You might be in a meeting talking about an idea that one of your junior members had, and Paul will interrupt with a long spiel about how that just won’t work.

The Underminer is often self-absorbed and has good ideas about 50% of the time. His quality of ideas though isn’t the problem. The problem lies with his interaction with others. He often will put down others in either direct or indirect ways to make his idea sound better.

The Underminer can be difficult to manage because there is a big ego present. This guy thinks he’s Einstein; how do I tell him that I value his ideas, but that he needs be respectful of others (and you) when discussing solutions? At the very core of every team is to establish trust and vulnerability.

Hold a meeting with your team and have each person go around and talk about one thing they are good at and one thing they struggle with – and don’t allow canned answers.

If your Underminer can’t perform this exercise genuinely, it’s probably clear that they aren’t capable of being vulnerable, and in that case will always be detrimental to your team’s success.

Building Trust

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In conclusion, these are just a few personalities of difficult people, there may be more. But there are two truths that transfer to handling all kinds of difficult people. As the leader, you have to create trust and vulnerability on your team AND you have to give honest feedback when necessary. What’s worse than giving bad feedback?

Giving no feedback. If you aren’t able to be vulnerable as a leader and treat the symptoms of your ailing team, your team will suffer for it.

If you were to choose, would you prefer to be a General with a “decent” troop who were all vulnerable and trustworthy or a General of an exceptionally gifted troop who didn’t respect each other? Be the first General and start taking actions to build trust with your difficult people.

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc., an international crisis management consultancy, author of Manager’s Guide to Crisis Management and Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training. Erik Bernstein is vice president for the firm, and also editor of its newsletter, Crisis Manager]

Who should be a part, and what are their responsibilities?

Local governments are responsible for a huge amount of crisis management. Think about it – how many moving pieces does even a smaller municipal area have to take care of, and how many are affected by even a small hiccup in operations?

ICMA, a professional and educational association for local government administrators, recently shared an infographic that does a fantastic job of which local government personnel should be on your crisis team, and what the roles and responsibilities of each should be:

 

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc., an international crisis management consultancy, author of Manager’s Guide to Crisis Management and Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training. Erik Bernstein is vice president for the firm, and also editor of its newsletter, Crisis Manager]

Hacks affect organizations of all shapes and sizes

Hacks on major corporations have made headlines throughout 2016, but what you don’t see discussed nearly so often is the huge impact cybercrime can have on small business. In this eye-opening infographic, the Canadian government’s cybersecurity experts discuss how online attacks affect small business, and why they can actually affect these types of businesses more than they do larger operations.

[Click image to enlarge]

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc., an international crisis management consultancy, author of Manager’s Guide to Crisis Management and Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training. Erik Bernstein is vice president for the firm, and also editor of its newsletter, Crisis Manager]

Watching what people say about you on the internet is a must

Every single person, and every single brand, should be monitoring their reputation online. After all, the the number one place anyone with a complaint will head, and the place everyone relies on to provide them information on who to do business with.

While there are plenty of ways to take online reputation monitoring “to the next level”, having the basics in place will position you to be aware of most issues, and to react. If you’re lost as to how to get started, try the simple steps outlined in this infographic from the social media analytics experts at TalkWalker:

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc., an international crisis management consultancy, author of Manager’s Guide to Crisis Management and Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training. Erik Bernstein is vice president for the firm, and also editor of its newsletter, Crisis Manager]

[Editor’s note: This guest post from reader Keith Bell looks at a number of ways you can avoid the harm that frequently comes to businesses who run into internet or other IT outages.]

6 Tips to cruise through

In any infrastructure, there were, are and always will be some level of disruption. Internet outage is no exception to that too. Just like a water system experiences periodic issues and electricity companies experience periodic outages, IT companies too experience internet outages. The thing is that in today’s world where a majority of things have become internet dependant, internet connectivity issues have become as important as water and power issues when it comes to infrastructure dependency. Internet outages can cause huge loss of productivity in an IT business and unfortunately, these outages happen more frequently compared to other major services. Various estimates of surveys and studies done by IT industry analyst companies revealed that businesses face a whooping financial loss between $84,000 and $108,000 on an average for a single hour of downtime of their IT systems. For any IT business owner, there has to be three fundamental questions in mind – how to protect the business? How to minimize the impact? How to be prepared for an internet outage? Now, to deal with internet outages, you’ve to have a proper contingency plan in place. And a proper contingency plan must consist of some key points. Let’s have a look at such 6 crucial points that would help you sail through internet outages.

1. Notify the stakeholders

The first thing to do when an internet outage happens is to inform the stakeholders. They should be provided with relevant, rich and timely data so that they can provide feedback and react accordingly. Conversely, it’s also equally important to notify the staff and customers at the same time. As companies are becoming heavily reliant on internet and other related systems, security, profitability and productivity are at much greater risks than ever. Also, ensure that the IT team knows complete details of the outage. Be it a planned or unplanned outage, your IT professionals must be able to efficiently communicate about it to all related persons affected by the outage. However, prevention is always better than cure. So, it’s imperative to continually monitor, develop and review your IT infrastructure with the latest technology available.

Discussing with your ISP service provider over the issues that your organization might have in times of outage is a must. Though such problems cannot be avoided 100% of the times, a good service provider will do all in his reign to not let his clients down. Such issues can be reported through publicly available portals that may contact and provide the necessary details to the service providers.

2. Have different carriers for the internet connections

One of the best ways to safeguard your business is to have more than one internet service providers whose services route through different links. It’s much like having a UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) when it comes to power outages. The only difference is that you can utilize the second provider link to support your network bandwidth rather than keeping it on standby or idle. The second one doesn’t need to be of the same capacity or cost or have the same assurance agreement as your primary internet provider because you can always prioritize one of the internet connections over others. There’re a significant number of affordable carriers available in the market to make this possible.

3. Secure the Email first
   
   

Email is the primary tool that allows you to stay connected with employees, customers and suppliers during an internet outage. You can add an extra layer of protection for cases like outages occurring from provider’s end like Google Mail or Office 365. An email security solution based on cloud allows you to work seamlessly even if your primary mail system is down. For most businesses, simple relocation of the user with connectivity issue is adequate enough to ensure continuous workflow. Today, when wifi hotspots are widely available, your staff can remotely reconnect, access business systems and email during an outage and then return to the primary one when the outage has been fixed. By adding redundancy and mail archiving, you can be prepared for internet outage. These ensure you’re not out of business when your systems are down. During an internet outage, if you’ve to use internet anyway, tethering your phone is perhaps the last resort. Though you can use tethering straight from your carrier but that’s expensive, especially if you don’t use it often. Conversely, tethering may have some problems like data limitation and sometimes tethering fees are exorbitantly high as well. Alternatively, you can use cheap pay-as-you-go mobile hotspots for exigencies. In case of internet outages, you just need to turn it on, connect to the wifi and continue with your work.

4. Having cloud files available offline can be a smart move

We store important documents in the cloud to access them anytime from anywhere with an internet connection. But in the case of internet outage, how can you access them? Service like Skydrive (though things have slightly changed for Windows 8.1) and Dropbox allow you to use those files offline. These services sync documents straight to the computer and if you’ve proper clients installed, you can seamlessly use them offline and they’ll sync when you’re reconnected. When using these services, you need to keep one complication in mind – conflicting files. When you edit a shared file offline, the same may be edited by someone else at the same time. In that case, you’ll see conflicted version of the file when you’re connected the next time. You can also use Google Drive where you can easily upload the file and access them offline as if you’re working with the desktop app. Things get tricky when you use the online office suite of Google Drive. You’ll only be able to edit presentations and documents, while spreadsheets just remain viewable. However, it’s always better than nothing. So, if you want to use Google Drive, make sure you properly set this up.

5. Need research? Download the site!

Research has become a crucial part of most of present day jobs. Though it entirely happens online in almost all cases, with services like Evernote, you can have the information on your computer offline. The web clipper of Evernote is the finest content saving tool that allows you to access everything relevant to the research offline. While installing Evernote, don’t forget to install its desktop version. It’s not only a note-saving application but it allows collaboration and file-sharing with others too – thanks to the free storage provided by it. Before you can install the Evernote Clipper, you’ve to register with Evernote and create an account. If you want to read RSS feeds offline, obtain a desktop client that allows offline reading. If you’re using Windows 8, go for NextGen Reader, which sync with Feedly Cloud. If you’re a Mac user, you can look for Readkit that allows feeds to be downloaded to your computer, enabling you to read them offline. Also, ensure download of all your required documents that you need to use regularly.

6. Use of mobile broadband

Mobile broadband is a term widely used to describe mobile internet access services that utilize mobile phone infrastructure and cellular network. The strength of the mobile broadband depends on the network signal. You can access mobile broadband from a significant number of devices including mobile phones, MiFi units, mobile dongles and data cards. Dongles are plug-and-play devices and USB-compatible. These are actually portable modems and widely referred as USB modems or mobile USB sticks. Today, two types of mobile broadband are available namely 3G and 4G. The main difference between these two is the speed. If you need to have a much faster connectivity, you should go for 4G instead of 3G. The goal of mobile broadband is to provide the customers with low cost and high speed connectivity. By using this technology, you can have wireless access across remote areas. Mobile broadband provides multitude of benefits. Let’s have a look at some of them.

• It comes at a cheaper pricing. Though 4G is more expensive than 3G, it’s still less expensive than home broadband.
• You don’t need to be connected to an Ethernet connection or be in the range of a mobile hotspot because mobile broadband acts like a portable modem. You can plug the device directly into one of your USB ports and start working which makes it quite hassle-free.
• Simply put, you can use it anywhere. You just need to have the required signal strength.
• Nowadays, 4G provides much faster connectivity than most of the average home broadband providers which makes mobile broadband a more viable option compared to fixed-line internet connections.
• Mobile modems are discreet and small which means you can carry them even in your pocket and connect to the internet whenever you want to.

If you want to use mobile broadband rarely, a standard 3G pack should be perfect for you. In case your work involves heavy downloads, you should look for economical or special packages to avoid incurring additional costs.

Final Thoughts

Internet outages are always unpredictable but with these 6 tips, you can minimize the business impact. If you become prepared for this inevitable occurrence beforehand, you can save a lot of unproductive time when the catastrophe strikes.

Pointers to protect your personal brand

Although high-profile cases of individuals losing out on job opportunities, being fired, or costing themselves big bucks as a result of online behavior regularly make headlines, there still seems to be a disconnect between the very real potential consequences and what people are willing to share. This infographic from Switzerland-based KBSD lays out precisely why every one of us needs to watch what we’re posting online, and even what others may be posting about us!

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc., an international crisis management consultancy, author of Manager’s Guide to Crisis Management and Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training. Erik Bernstein is vice president for the firm, and also editor of its newsletter, Crisis Manager]

This book could save your life

[Editor’s note: We are in the business of looking at the best ways to persevere through ugly situations, so when we saw that Jacquelyn Lynn had penned a collection of conversations regarding how to survive an active shooter event we felt drawn to share. The below is a preview of her newly released book, How to Survive an Active Shooter: What You do Before, During and After an Attack Could Save Your Life.]

If you find yourself in an active shooter situation, you have four basic action options:

• Flee
• Defend
• Oppose
• Defeat

This excerpt from How to Survive an Active Shooter: What You do Before, During and After an Attack Could Save Your Life discusses the first option.

How to Survive an Active Shooter is based on an interview with a terrorism and security expert. Questions are in italics; answers are in plain type.

Q. Let’s talk about the first tactic, which is to survive by running away.

A. Okay. As soon as you realize you’re in an active shooter situation, your first thought should be to flee. It should be flight. If you are a moving target, you are almost impossible to hit with a gun. Also why would you want to stand still, and thus volunteer to be the target of choice in a crowded room?

As you run away, don’t run in a straight line. I’m not telling you to serpentine, but you don’t want to run in a straight line. With just a little zigzagging, you’ll be nearly impossible to hit and every inch you get further away is an improved chance you have at survival. Distance is your friend.

If you need to hide briefly to get that distance, hide briefly, let him walk past you, and get that distance. If you need to play dead, play dead and get him past you so you can get that distance.

Now, something to keep in mind as you’re making the decisions necessary to survive, is that if you hide or play dead, you are going to have things that may draw attention to you. Any twitch, any cough, any motion, or your cell phone will draw attention to you.

I’m sure everybody reading this has at some point sat in a restaurant or a bar and noticed that if a television is on, it doesn’t matter if it’s underwater pottery that’s on, you are going to watch it. The mind is programmed to pay attention to whatever is in motion. It’s part of the way the human mind works.

If you’re going to play dead, you’d better do it well. What is keeping you alive is the motion of others because that’s what the shooter’s attention will be drawn to. Somebody else will be that target, but it won’t you, though, because you’re not drawing attention to yourself, you’re not moving.

It’s not that you aren’t going to be seen or that he’s going to be fooled and say, “Oh, I already shot that one,” it’s that among the 100 or 200 or 300 people in the room, you are not drawing attention.

Q. He’s looking for motion. His eye is drawn to motion.

A. Yes. That’s what will attract him—motion.

Q. It seems almost cold-hearted and selfish to say that your first goal should be to not draw attention to yourself so that the shooter will focus on someone else. I think most people are going to have a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea that they need to take care of themselves first and that the person next to them may die but that’s just the way it has to be.

A. It’s the airline rule of “put on your own oxygen mask first” because if you’re dead, you can’t help anyone else. You hear this on every airline flight: When the oxygen masks drop, put on yours first then help those around you.

That’s the mentality here. If you’re alive, you’re either going to escape and be a witness or you’re going to stay and hopefully be a force for good in thwarting the attack. But you are useless to everybody if you’re dead. Put on your mask first, then put on the masks of those around you.

Learn more in How to Survive an Active Shooter: What You do Before, During and After an Attack Could Save Your Life. Go here to order on Amazon.

Jacquelyn Lynn is an inspirational author, business writer and ghostwriter whose dynamic books and insightful articles have been helping business leaders work smarter and more profitably for nearly three decades. More recently, her inspirational books have provided comfort and encouragement to thousands of readers. Her credits include writing or ghostwriting more than 30 books; 3,000+ articles in over 100 regional, national and international publications; and countless blogs, ebooks, newsletters, white papers, news releases, and more. Jacquelyn is also the co-creator of two series of coloring books for adults: Faith Works, a series of Christian coloring books with inspirational messages and The Experience, a series of event and/or destination coloring books.