How to Deal with Employees who Undermine Your Authority

Managing your team can be cumbersome. Especially if you feel like you have an employee who undermines your authority.

After sharing a bit of my expert opinion on the subject, the editors asked me to elaborate. You won’t want to miss this one!

Check out this article from UpJourney where I shared tips on how to deal with difficult situations like this!

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In general, my feedback for managers deals with refocusing on listening, reconnecting to your team members, and consider something from their perspective.

If you find yourself in a place where you feel like you have been undermined there’s two sides to that story — there is your reaction to what the other person did and there’s their actions.

All of our actions, emotions, and reactions come from our own layered understanding of people. Our perspective is made up of our experience, social norms, systemic racism, religious influences, and gender bias.

We can’t immediately look at the actions you should take when you experience being undermined as a manager. If we do that, it denies the very situation that happened.

Check your privilege

For too long the power dynamics in manager-employee relationships have continued to drive inequities in the workplace. Our own privilege gets activated when we start talking about an employee who undermines us.

So before you think about reacting, consider the actions your employee took. Write them down and strip away all of your own emotional reaction out of it. Identify the facts of what happened. Then ask yourself if you would have reacted differently if that person was of a different race, gender, or other identities.

If you answered yes, then you have work to do to change that reaction and perspective. Do your own work before you even think about responding.

Hurt

Sometimes the feeling of being undermined as a manager comes from your own place of insecurity. I know that imposter syndrome is something that is talked about quite often and people of all shapes sizes and experiences can experience imposter syndrome. I bring up insecurities or impostor syndrome not to attack you, but you acknowledge your humanity.

At our very core, humans are pack animals. Anything that we do that might jeopardize our standing in our social groups can cause insecurity, fear, anxiety, or even depression. So for some leaders who feel they’ve been undermined, it’s important that you first look at yourself and why are you having the reaction you are having.

Sometimes the actions of our employees can be very hurtful. And I just want to acknowledge that. It doesn’t feel good to be undermined. Many times when people are hurt, they lash out at others. That might be what happened to your employee. Take time to consider their perspective.

Listening

Understanding the root cause behind your employee’s hostility is the first step to improving this situation. As leaders, it is our responsibility to always listen and pay attention to our employees.

Toxic work situations can be resolved when we recognize the problems our employees are facing and make an effort to acknowledge and resolve them. There may be a legitimate grievance that needs to be addressed to help repair the relationship with this employee.

Modeling behaviors

Once we are able to address the cause for this toxic behavior, we also need to make sure that we’re modeling the behaviors that we want to continue. When a leader is demonstrating the skills that they’re asking of their team, the team has the opportunity to see the skills in action and see how effective those skills are. I

It is demotivating to an employee to have a manager ask for something that they are not willing to do themselves. If you begin to model toxic or difficult behaviors like one of your employees, you are implicitly communicating to them that their behavior is okay or acceptable. Watch yourself — have you undermined your employees?