How do I manage this man?

[superstress]

I am a manager for a small company, with different teams working under me. One of the managers I manage is very career focussed and cut throat, which is good in some ways but he is not a team player and aggressively fights to overachieve. This creates a backlog of work for other team members to achieve and is unrealistic, damages quality of service and has rapidly effected the dynamics of the wider team. He refuses to take any advice from me and any time I provide guidance on the core business and effects of his approach, is taken above me and reported as disrespect to him and his position. Every decision I make is challenged or ignored, which makes it impossible for me to manage the wider team as I am constantly undermined.

If the quality of service continues to drop as we drown the other staff in work they cannot physically complete, the business will decline and potentially cease to exist. I do not know how to manage this man because he has a lot of potential and could go far but I cannot allow this approach to damage the business and potentially lose other team members due to undue stress.

My manager is very supportive of me and my decisions but I am struggling with how to approach the situation. In a perfect world I would keep all staff members and refocus the work on the reputation we want to maintain but I don't think that this is a possibility at this stage. This is spilling over into my personal life, I can't sleep, lose concentration and feel overly stressed all the time to the point I am questioning staying in the role.

Any advice on how to effectively manage this situation would be greatly appreciated.

@superstress
I have given him additional responsibilities and he has not managed them well.

Make sure you give him constructive feedback. I think you are going to have to be more pro active than normal and be clear he is not performing as well as he should be in some areas.

PIP and manage him out.

Will your manager support getting rid of him?

How you are describing the wider team makes them sound like not very dynamic plodders. Could it be that they need to up their game but rather than manage that it is easier to focus on this individual?

Due to the diversity of the roles the staff in varied areas are extremely different but are all skilled, qualified and experienced but overloaded. I think I need to align responsibilities amongst the entire business objectives

If he's causing issues with the work won't listen to you, you need to performance manage him.

He sounds like a twit but not sure you are going to change his personality though. He sounds good at whatever he is doing to get commission. And presumably the higher ups like that he brings in more work, If he is bringing in substantially more business is it possible to recruit more of the people in the other teams to take on this extra work sharing the workload.

I'd also go down the pip path, getting HR involved and making sure he has clear points of improvement with proof and measures so he can cease his ridiculous claims of bullying.

I had a member of my last team who acted like this - not to the same degree, but she was loudest in her protestations on salary, progression, and it seeped out to create an atmosphere of toxicity in the wider team. I was very lucky to have HR on my side to help tell her to watch herself, but these situations are so tricky to deal with.

Document everything.
Meeting with followup email detailing date and time of discussion with
'Your role is to do x and y'
'You must not do a and b'
EVERY time he ignores this, another meeting, another email. Then a PIP.
The biggest mistake people make is not documenting conversations.

Would your line manager consider being present at your next meeting with him? He's got nowhere to go with his allegations then.

It sounds like you're criticising him for being good at his job in which case I'm not surprised he's going over your head. If he's generating more work and therefore more income for the business then surely you should be directing your energy towards getting the company to provide you with more employees to complete that work.

if he is not a team player and he is not listening to feedback from his boss (you) then he is not meeting the requirements of the job.

spell this out to him and move towards a PIP.

So the company is unsupportive of you?

If he’s really excelling in what sounds like a sales role, but your company lacks the infrastructure to support that, surely the answer is to put in more support, not hold back someone who would appear to be an excellent hire.

Part of his job role as a team lead will (should) be to achieve a high level of team member job satisfaction that balances overall team performance. So you can give him a range of performance goals for himself - his reward is based on both those things, and so his 360 feedback and improvement goals should cover both those things. If is isn’t taking active steps toward team happiness, he isn’t making the grade.