Managing an talented but hyperactive/impulsive employee

In My Humble Opinion
1

So I’m the manager on a small technology team. The office culture is relaxed but quiet. My team typically works on a complex projects that require extended periods of individual work and concentration. Brainstorming tends to be scheduled.

A month an a half ago, I hired a new employee based on the strength of his technical talents and his enthusiasm for the work. My initial assessment was spot on - he’s quickly become a key player, by completing some projects that we had been stonewalled on for months before his arrival, making key catches on potential future problems, and showing a willingness to come in early and stay late to get things done.

BUT:

He’s driving me bonkers, and it’s starting to affect the productivity of the rest of the team. He’s a natural loud talker, which is made worse by his tendency to interact with colleagues by hollering over the cubicle walls. When I assign him a task, it’s almost like he feels compelled to verbalize every step of his thought process as he works his way through the problem, which results in him sticking his head in my office every ten minutes to give me an update when he’s made a minor change to something.

He’s also not very good on picking up on social cues; if I’m walking toward the printer or the bathroom or a conference room with a determined look on my face, obviously on my way to do something and he has a trivial progress update to share or a question to ask, he’ll do his best to corral me, going so far as to follow me as far as the bathroom door.

The worst part is when we’re in fire-fighting mode. We’ll occasionally experience an urgent problem that requires immediate attention and all hands on deck. I understand that everybody gets a bit wound up in those situations (I tend to pace and chain smoke), but once his adrenaline gets going, it can take him a couple of hours to wind down. Meanwhile, the volume of his voice goes up twenty decibels and he pinballs around between my office and his colleagues’ cubicles for hours after the problem is resolved and the post mortem is put to bed.

So my dilemma is this: how to I get him to tone it down without affecting his enthusiasm for the work? I understand that his working style is part of what makes him so productive, at least on paper, but I can’t let this go on for too much longer without creating a destructive dynamic.

I have a couple of things in play already for specific issues - we’re setting up a group irc channel to hopefully cut down on some of the hollering, and I’m pretty much telling him to dial back the volume when he gets especially excited or strident about something.

Any other tips?

2

He’d be a great candidate to work from home, eh? :wink: I wonder if he might be on the autism spectrum. Sounds like a great employee, but a terrible coworker. Is it an option to give him his own office (or cubicle I guess, but office would sell the idea better) in another area of the building where the rest of the team physically can’t interact face-to-face with him regularly? If not, the chat will help. We have one for my small team (6 of us in the IT dept of a bank) and it helps cut down a **lot **on noisy chatter.

But hey, have you tried just being blunt? Something like, “Inside voices, Jerry!” would work, especially coming from a manager. Have a meeting with him and clarify that you love his work output, but his coworkers (and you!) have different work styles than him and can’t function at *your *100% while being disrupted so much. It can be difficult to have these conversations, whether in an office environment or with acquaintances outside work. But you’re the boss, and that’s your job. Besides, in my experience, people with poor boundaries like this don’t mind if you verbalize the nonverbal cues that most people pick up innately.

3

Maybe this recommended accommodations site will help you

ADHD http://askjan.org/media/lear.htm
Autism Autism Spectrum

4

I’m not as bad as he sounds, but I recognise that I have that potential. I’m quite an extreme extravert, have very little patience and when I’m switched on I have enormous enthusiasm which is infectious when it’s good, and downright annoying when it’s not. I’m not sure it’s got anything at all to do with ADD or anything similar. In my case, anyway, I actually have very good social awareness, it’s just that sometimes my active absorption overrides my sense of place. YMMV and of course his too.

In my own case, maturity has calmed me down a lot of course - I don’t behave in my forties the way I imagine I did in my twenties. I also understand myself very well and have carved out my career in a direction which means I minimize my negative impact on others and maximise my usefulness. I’ll never be a people manager, it’s not in me, but I often become the de factor leader, and I’m happiest when I can work with absolute minimum control.

All of which is to say I’m not sure I’m exactly the same as your guy, but maybe similar. What would work with me is an honest, unheated discussion. Not a post-mortem, not a formal review, just a chat. “Bob, here’s where you’re making a contribution, here’s where you’re driving everyone batshit crazy” sort of thing. Encourage him to recognise his patterns and make some suggestions. Working from home, if it’s an option, may well help him to get into his productive zone and keep him from distracting everyone else. Or is there a space anywhere else in the building he can work sometimes? I used to book meeting rooms for myself and my closest colleague, who luckily for us both is like me only more so. To be honest, we’d mess around all day and produce our results in the last half hour of the day, but we were damn good at our jobs and trusted to work, even by my extreme control-freak boss.

5

I also immediately thought “autistic spectrum disorder.” If it’s an undiagnosed mental or mood disorder (he could also be manic, maybe?), there’s not much you can do other than suggest he seek professional help. His behavior is making him unable to function normally in a work environment, which is basically the definition of pathological in the DSM (pervasive pattern impairing normal functioning).

If you aren’t comfortable with that or in the position to make that kind of recommendation, I would agree that having him work from home (google+ or Skype him in for meetings) is worth a try. If he can stay on top of his work, it’s a win-win.

6

Rachellelogram has good suggestions. Maybe a private office will do instead of working remotely. You may need to find someone who isn’t aggravated by him to work together with him, and help calm him down when he gets hyped up. And you should keep an eye on him too, he might crack some day. It’s not about going postal, but he may become depressed, burn out, or just be driven to distraction from boredom if the work is no longer challenging. Make sure he takes vacations, and even though it’s not work related, try to help him form relationships outside of work, if you can.

7

Thanks for all of the replies; I mean to get back yesterday, but I kept getting interrupted every five minutes.

The more that I think about the autism spectrum suggestions, the more they make sense. The failure to pick up on social cues is subtle when I deal with it in small doses, but pretty stark when I think about the breadth of my interactions with him.

Unfortunately, the private office is probably out - we’re too cheap to give offices to every line worker, and installing him in a spare one would signal the rest of the team that he’s being rewarded for something. Anyway, I’d worry that he’d never spend any time in it.

I’ve been thinking about two factors that may be influencing his behavior that aren’t necessarily mental health related. First, his previous position was pretty much a one-man show, so he hasn’t really worked with a team of technical peers for a decade or more. Second, he lost his previous job due to layoffs, so he may be feeling some level of insecurity about my appreciation of the quality of his work.

I think I’m going to attack those two specific issues first before I start armchair psychoanalyzing him. Hopefully a lot of reassurance plus a bit of a reintroduction to the concept of team dynamics will be enough to calm him down.

8

Along those lines: people respond very well if you tell them they are what you want them to be.

Perhaps you could, when you give him a task or project, express that you are giving it to him because you know that you can trust him to do this. Then list all the things that you actually want as things that you think he will do well: I know that you will just quietly work on this until it’s done, and that means I won’t have to be thinking about it. Etc. Obviously you don’t want it to be entirely untrue, so you’ll have to work on the phrasing.

People can become what you expect of them, and it already sounds as if he really wants to live up to your expectations as he is constantly coming back to you for confirmation.

9

A previous manager who expected constant reporting may have exacerbated the situation.

My own team’s solution to He Who Won’t Shut Up comes mainly in the form of headphones, but he’s been a long-time employee of the company for which I subcontract. We know that so long as he delivers, the bosses consider the additional tension he brings to the team as part of the general tension of being in consulting (no. Really, no. When he’s not around, the rest of us get a lot more done and are a lot less snippy). You know those cartoons about “how to tell whether your programmers are working”? In his case, if he’s reading on the web he’s silent; sadly it’s when he works that he won’t shut up, and it’s not as if we can tell him “shut up and go back to reading the funnies!”