Recently some folks have been struggling with an employee who is just driving them crazy.

It is a situation where the employee has many personal agendas about their job and their working conditions. They then look for any small misstep on the part of management.  When they find something they seize the moral high ground, blow everything out of proportion and perspective and commence a campaign of complaining and demands.

The kicker is, behind all this is a desire to maneuver themselves to a more favorable and comfortable position.

If others feel this “campaign of terror” will benefit them also, they’ll sign up and join – then it really gets interesting.

The lynchpin is that they feel they have the moral high ground due to this supposed mistake that management has made. This is the doorway in.

And as we might imagine, when this dynamic ignites, it’s very easy for any of us to go into a slight panic – rush around, look at each other and say, “what are we going to do?”.  I mean after all the employee who supposedly has the moral high-ground is a hot potato that we really don’t know how to handle.  

And this is the leverage they are counting on in hopes we willpull back under the weight of guilt and give them what they want.

OK, the first thing I can say, if it’s of any help, is you’re not alone.  We’ve all been through this. Many of us more than once.

And that is the answer – we get through it.

The antidote to this dynamic – the one thing that really helps is staying steady and showing this employee that you are not rattled in the least. 

That playing the moral high-ground card is not a move that has any agency in a business that is run by humans, supported by humans and is for the benefit of humans.

We’re humans.  We all make mistakes. This is a given in business and life in general.  

We don’t play a game of moral “tag your it”.  Our focus is, within the given context of what we reasonably can expect from folks, how can we band together, support each other and move our shared enterprise down the road to make this a better world.

Now that’s the moral high-ground!

So we don’t knee-jerk.  We normalize, educate and with a mature even- tempered pace we move forward with our reasonable business decisions.

We move forward knowing that the turbulence of unreasonableness will never outlast the real moral high-ground that displays poise, grace and self-confidence.

Hang in there.