Are the most talented employees in your workplace also the most difficult to deal with? Different employees will require engagement criteria that works for his or her individual personality – it’s not a one size fits all solution. So how can you identify what engagement criteria will work for those talented yet difficult employees? Job suitability assessments are one way, and lucky for you, Peoplescape consultants are skilled at analyzing the data provided by such tools. Also, looking at an employee’s generational profile can tell you a lot about what their needs will be in order to keep them engaged in the workplace and focused on solutions for the projects and challenges at hand. It is also important to look at the competition; what are the pay rates and benefit packages for similar positions across the industry marketplace? Lastly, making sure that management is well-trained and able to engage their employees is a critical piece of this puzzle. You don’t want to let your talented employees go, but you also want to make their difficulty something that managers and peers can work with – rather than it being an obstacle.
So what are some easy-to-identify traits of these difficult yet talented employees? Here goes!

1. They know their worth to the organization.
2. They are organizationally and politically savvy.
3. They have little respect for hierarchy.
4. They are demanding and often expect instant access to the resources they need at any given moment.
5. They network well – a pro and con for any organization because their network extends to other places of work if things don’t go accordingly to their plan!
6. They do not see any need for a manager (which makes managing them EXTREMELY challenging!)

In reading this list, I’m sure that you can identify a few of these employees in your own organization. Do they represent a wide generational population or do they typically fall into that millennial or Generation X category? As we’ve discussed at length at peoplescapehr.com/blog, encouraging employees of these generational groups and providing a stimulating work environment can go a long way to support successful working relationships between generations. However, you have to be careful that you are not catering to a difficult yet talented population of employees and accidentally ignoring everyone else. There must be some balance to the process, and managers will have to tread lightly to successfully engage their troublemakers (said with some sarcasm…and a little bit of an epiphany in thinking I myself have been one of those in workplaces – sincere apologies to my former supervisors!) while still making the less difficult and more dependable employees feel comfortable and valued as well.