Scenario (Question 1)
You have recently taken over a small team. This is your first role as a team leader and you have been warned by the previous manager that one of your team, Suzie, can be difficult. She a woman in her mid-fifties, has been working in the same role for a number of years, and has applied for the leadership role twice but has been passed over both times. The outgoing manager tells you that he suspects that she will not take well to having you as her new supervisor, particularly given your relative youth.
You spend the first two weeks settling in and during this time Suzie is quiet; works solidly; hands her work in on time and is respectful. One thing you have noticed is she is sometimes late to work and does not provide any explanation. Her lack of punctuality is relatively minor (she is never more than 10 minutes late) so you ignore it. However there are a number of changes that need to be made to operations and when you explain these to the team, everyone but Suzie participates in the discussion. You know that you cannot ignore this or allow Suzie to undermine the necessary changes. You decide to take the evening to consider what you should do.
Scenario (Question 2)
You have noticed that there seems to be a lot of antagonism between your telesales team and the sales administration group. You have worked hard on building your team spirit and they are now top performers, enjoying their work and having lots of fun in the process.
However the sales administration team that handle the orders and bill customers are becoming belligerent, in particular "going slow" on orders from Joe, your star performer.
As an initial step you decided to ask the sales admin. team leader out for a coffee to discuss it, and explore what you and she might be able to do together to ease the situation. However you were taken aback when her response was, "How can you expect us to get our work done when your team is so noisy. You always seem to be having parties, and we just can't concentrate. Not only that, you seem to think we are your slaves. How can you help? Just back off and let us do our work - and keep Joe out of our hair. He acts like a real prima donna and we are tired of it."