Stressful work environment

I work with adults who have developmental disabilities in a residential environment. It is a very rewarding job, but obviously stressful at times. I care a lot about the guys I work with anyway. Oddly enough, the more challenging aspect of my job is dealing with my coworkers. When I was hired a year ago, I noticed immediately that there is a lot of tension, passive aggressive behavior, and dishonesty. Meanwhile, I was trained in by a lead staff who had grown irresponsible and eventually abusive. She was actually recently reported and fired for physically and verbally abusing one of the people. When the position opened up, I was a little hesitant to apply because I had only been there for about 10 months... but what the hell, I decided to anyway. The struggling supervisor, wanting to reconfirm her expectations with the now incompetent workers, recognized my potential as a leader and decided to promote me over veteran co-workers.

When we had the interview for the position, her mind was already made up and we discussed the potential difficulties I'd encounter. We both knew that:
- staff would not respect me because I haven't been around long enough
- changing unproductive habits would be met with some amount of hostility and disagreement
- I would encounter difficulty approaching my defensive coworkers with any kind of sugar-coated constructive criticism

My leadership style is to be a role model and set an example of what is expected, be a good listener, and highlight/showcase strengths of coworkers through positive reinforcement. I think building rapport is key to successful management. Simultaneously, I think the most effective way to address performance concerns privately in a timely manner, sticking to facts and observations and asserting expectations verbally. I know I'm a total n00b and have a lot of areas to improve on, like using more effective communication. Likewise, there are A LOT of improvements to be made and habits to be broken; it'll take some time before we're up-to-par.

Immediately after I got promoted, staff started talking shit about me and resorted to the most pathetic attempts to shut me down, including outright making up garbage about me to try and get me in trouble with the supervisor. Here's an example - I edited someone's timesheet because they were leaving early and arriving late without making changes to it. Regardless that there are other superiors who can edit without her knowing who did it, she wrote me an email with hostile tone about not giving her time enough to update it. I visited with her about it, concerned that she was angry at me. She obviously denied it and we came to some agreement about it in the future. I thought it went well, but could tell she did not like being confronted. She wrote my supervisor an email afterward, making up some crap about me going on and on about "being the lead and being in charge now" and accused me of being on some kind of power trip among other threats and accusations. The best part, though, is she shows up on time now.

Other staff are accusing me of things like showing up late, while others are twisting my words around and trying to make me look like some kind of nazi. It's ridiculous. I was talking with one staff about a possible solution for taking one person out in the community meanwhile asking for her insight and she turned around and told my sup that I told her she needed to re-evaluate the way she uses verbal prompting. I can't wrap my head around this level of manipulation. I am seeing some progress, but I'm paying heavily with my emotional welfare. I can tell that when I'm not around, all they do is scrutinize my efforts. You know, it really hurts my feelings that they do this because I respect all of them and recognize their strengths and potential. I really need some insight and advice on how to move forward with this situation. Any criticism is welcome. Thanks for reading.

I don't have an advice for you but I sympathize with your situation. In my working experience I have accepted that within a group, one to one disagreements are normal to occur every now and then, but I could never understand the lack of personality and principles some people can have, when they gang up against one person, try to isolate him, make his life difficult and I have never ever taken part in anything that low.

I have however learnt to stand up for myself when certain situations kept repeating and surprisingly when I finally confrunted a couple of people who were being unfair, their behavior improved considerably right away. Something that hadn't occurred during the whole year I spent waiting for them to show a bit more class and trusting that for sure they would simply try to do the right thing.

A friend of mine was offered the managing position of a beauty salon within four months of working there and that made her the new most hated person. She received no support from the staff which she needed very much as everything was very new to her and only a few months later the director position was offered to someone else and she was offered to work at the reception instead. Most of the people would have felt humiliated then and left probably, looking for another job, but my friend stayed, survived in that difficult environment and three years later she became again the director and has been managing successfully that clinic since then.

I have visited her at work on several occasions and to be honest, she was mean to some of the staff. I assumed that it was the only way she could survive and impose herself there.

It seems that there is always a price to pay for being successful and wanting to do things right, but you are needed there, have the best intentions and the right qualities and hopefully somehow you'll find your own way to overcome those difficulties without sacrificing too much of your emotional wellbeing and keep doing the great job you do. Your superiors are on your side and this is a good thing and new people who could start working there might be a bit more supportive too. Good luck.

Tropus, your dilemma made for interesting discussion with my hubby last night. He's never interested in discussing relationship issues, but this was something I could draw him on.

A couple of questions he asked:

What attempts at changing the behaviour of your workers have been tried in the past?

Will further training help your staff learn better workplace behaviours?

What is YOUR supervisor doing to support you? For example, you and your supervisor running a meeting with all staff where it's made clear that new work practices and expectations will be starting now. Failing that, you and your supervisor meeting workers individually and giving warnings about behaviour?

Can you let go of the laziest, rudest support worker and hopefully scare the others into line?

At worst, can you start a clean out? It may come down to this.

Ugh. I feel for you. My wife worked in that same job for about 3 years and the stress of it was horrible.