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.