"A couple of years ago, a new member of our team was very defiant towards another team lead and me when given direction on the job. This all started after his initial training on the job. For the first week or two, I remained diligent in my attempts to give directions in a forthright and personable manner. After seeing a few times where my direction was ignored, I decided to talk to the employee in a one on one environment away from other coworkers. I focused on communicating in a very personable manner and tried to get to the root of what could've been causing the defiance of direction. In this approach, the employee opened up about what he felt were significant inefficiencies in our training and onboarding process and let me know that he would be putting his best foot forward from there. Indeed he did from there and remains a great employee. Looking back, I'm really thankful that this whole scenario played out because I was able to pose some potential training issues to our HR team as well."
