Working With and Evaluating Difficult School Employees

Managing difficult employees is one of the most challenging aspects of a headteacher’s job. Working With and Evaluating Difficult School Employees is designed to help educational leaders learn and apply specific techniques and strategies for effectively dealing with difficult school employees. Drawing on their extensive experiences in working productively with marginal, deficient, and downright difficult school employees, John F. Eller and Sheila Eller provide essential information and proven strategies to help administrators improve their leadership skills and competencies in dealing with employees who may have negative attitudes, display a lack of awareness about their behaviour, blame others for problems, or are marginal performers. This resource opens each chapter with an overview of the content, offers a summary with questions for reflection, and presents easy-to-understand concepts, actual stories and vignettes, and abundant templates, bullet points, and key points throughout. A ready reference that allows readers to go to the specific section that meets their immediate needs, the book outlines: the nature of difficult employees; skills and tools for confronting the behaviours of difficult employees and achieving successful results; self-protection techniques for handling emotionally-draining encounters while staying on track with an improvement agenda; and, specific strategies for working with teachers, paraprofessionals and teaching assistants, administrative assistants and office staff, and custodians.