Ahead of a team chat about this later in week, seeking thoughts on how to handle or support or coach my team member.
We;ve just had a team restructure which involved this person (call him A) being promoted and he now has to directly manage/oversee a long-term contractor who works with us. It involves allocating tasks to the contractor on each of his days, as well as allocating tasks to others in the (very small) team.
The contractor has always been a bit prickly. Prone to passive agressive remarks and grumpiness. He's been working for us for about a decade, has excellent knowledge and skills, but is just hard to manage. ON occassion this does result in challenges with external stakeholders who he also handles roughly, but generally this is rare and we remove him from situations where that can be a risk. He's also entirely remote so that adds an extra dimension of it being hard to judge tone in messages etc.
A believes that the contractor's attitude has been worsening since A took over in new role, and that the remarks are becoming more personal. The contractor will often push back on tasks - he will do the thing he's asked but not before setting out his own view on what should be happening. A thinks he is doing this more now.
Sometimes I think A has a point - I have been on receiving end of this behaviour and I know it's annoying. But I just let it go as contractor is good overall and also I know he's having a rough time personally so I take it all as reflecting that rather than a sleight on me.
So in general terms my approach would be to encourage A to do same - just rise above it unless and until the contractor starts to not do his job well at which point we could consider alternatives but our field is very specialist so would be hard to replace him.
Problem is that my job share colleague who leads the team with me thinks differently - they feel we have a duty of care to A as it's his first 'leadership role' and the contractor is making that unpleasant so we should start to look at replacements.
A has sent me and the other team leader screenshots of messages he was upset by last week. To my mind they are just normal grumpiness from the contractor - nothing personal. I think A is reading too much into these small remarks because he is sensitised to it due to one or two more legitimate issues.
I also think that ending our long-term relationship with a contractor who does agood job overall is an over-reaction to A's hurt feelings.
What do you think? Am I being insensitive? Do I have a duty of care to A? Or should we be coaching him to rise above rather than removing the contractor?
For context both A and the contractor are white men but contractor is much older - so it's not a racism or sexism issue, but there's definitely a chance of age-sensitivity on both their parts.