Confronting the Toxic Dispatcher

Telecommunications professionals sign on for a vitally important job that is, by its very nature, intensely stressful. The mental, emotional and physical impact on the men and women who answer our calls for help is substantial, but it is made unnecessarily worse by toxic employees within the agency who compound the stresses that are inherent to the job.

Toxic employees can be such a distraction from the agency mission that supervisors and other employees seem to spend as much time dealing with internal issues as they spend actually serving the public.  At their worst, toxic employees work to intimidate supervisors—particularly inexperienced supervisors—while deflating the morale of their fellow employees due to management’s apparent inability to hold them accountable for their actions.

In this two-hour webinar, Attorney Matt Dolan will help attendees to develop management techniques that are ethically and legally defensible in confronting toxic employees, while also giving them the reasonable opportunity to engage in needed course corrections and improve.

Topics discussed will include:

• Recognizing common toxic traits
• Distinguishing skill gaps from fundamentally toxic character traits
• Coming to grips with the impact of the toxic few on the agency in making personnel decisions—from liability to morale to retention
• Utilizing Performance Improvement Plans and Progressive Discipline—demonstrating a good faith effort to make all officers successful