09/10/2026
I want to tell you about the time a company sent the wrong people to training.
Someone in the workplace behaved in a way that made things hard for everyone around them.
Not OCCASIONALLY.
CONSISTENTLY.
The kind of hard that becomes the background noise of every meeting, every project, every Monday morning.
Leadership knew. That part is important. This situation had not gone unnoticed. They noticed it, discussed it, and made a careful decision.
The decision was to protect the person causing the problem because their particular set of skills was considered too valuable to risk. What happened instead was that everyone on the team around them - the people doing their jobs, keeping their heads down, trying to make it work - got sent to a live training workshop.
How to Get Along with Difficult People.
I will give you a moment with that.
The team sat in that training, professional and polite, learning techniques for managing conflict that had nothing to do with the actual conflict they were living with five days a week. And then they went back to work. To the same situation. With the same person. Under the same leadership that had just communicated, loudly and clearly, exactly where everyone stood.
It got worse. Of course it did.
Here is what that decision actually said to every person who got sent to that room: your comfort is negotiable. Their contribution is not. We have done the math, and you came up short.
People hear that message even when it is never spoken out loud. And they respond to it the way anyone would - quietly, over time, by deciding that their talent might be better valued somewhere else.
Leadership did not lose one person that day. They lost a team.
Honestly though - when you send the wrong people to training, you are not solving the problem. You are just making sure everyone knows you know whose side you are on.
