I feel like she might as well be productive, and since we co-habitate I'm basically already supporting her.
Does she feel that way? Or does she feel like she's unemployed and, however much she might like you, if she has an argument with you she's going to be homeless? Power disparities get people to do things they're not really into and tend to stifle their ability to speak freely about it.
So HN, how would you deal with someone that has a bad attitude, lacks pride of ownership and quickly gets defensive?
Fire them. I like to talk to people to find out whether it's something that's external - maybe they've got a lot of stress going on at the moment, maybe there's some issue about the environment and we can move them to a different part of the building, maybe they started for one job and ended up doing another and we can find a place in the company where they can be productive, maybe they just hate meetings and would prefer to get a digest of the meeting by email... but if all that sort of thing fails? If there are serious problems with someone's attitude, that aren't being fixed by going 'when you say X I feel like Y,' or 'when you do X it has Y effect' ... that's something for them to address with a therapist. At the end of the day, I'm your boss, not your mother.
That needn't be a bad thing, it could just be you sitting down and going 'I don't feel like you're particularly invested in this, like you might rather be doing something else, and if we go ahead with it it's going to be a lot of stress. I want to share this with you but only if you feel like you're actually interested in learning this stuff. If you're not, then I'm okay with that - I want you to be happy. But we need to talk about it, because I'm quite serious about making this project work.'
If she still insists that she's interested and doesn't take kindly to hearing about the quality of her work after that, then you can be more blunt. 'You said you were interested in this sort of stuff and now you're saying it's not worth your bother. What's going on?'
I do think you're going to end up in a position where you're firing her if it really is a personality mismatch between the work and her. You can fix a lot of problems in someone's work, but I've never seen someone fix an attitude to get someone who's not invested in their work invested. I've seen them provide environments that better suit the person, tasks that better suit the person, even provide examples of good attitude and a guiding word here and there... never seen someone change someone just not being interested in something though.
In extremely blunt condensed form? My feeling is that you can have a girlfriend or you can have an employee, but you can't treat your employees like your girlfriends or your girlfriends like your employees without a significant trade-off being involved. Companies aren't counselling services for their workers.
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Does she feel that way? Or does she feel like she's unemployed and, however much she might like you, if she has an argument with you she's going to be homeless? Power disparities get people to do things they're not really into and tend to stifle their ability to speak freely about it.
Fire them. I like to talk to people to find out whether it's something that's external - maybe they've got a lot of stress going on at the moment, maybe there's some issue about the environment and we can move them to a different part of the building, maybe they started for one job and ended up doing another and we can find a place in the company where they can be productive, maybe they just hate meetings and would prefer to get a digest of the meeting by email... but if all that sort of thing fails? If there are serious problems with someone's attitude, that aren't being fixed by going 'when you say X I feel like Y,' or 'when you do X it has Y effect' ... that's something for them to address with a therapist. At the end of the day, I'm your boss, not your mother.
That needn't be a bad thing, it could just be you sitting down and going 'I don't feel like you're particularly invested in this, like you might rather be doing something else, and if we go ahead with it it's going to be a lot of stress. I want to share this with you but only if you feel like you're actually interested in learning this stuff. If you're not, then I'm okay with that - I want you to be happy. But we need to talk about it, because I'm quite serious about making this project work.'
If she still insists that she's interested and doesn't take kindly to hearing about the quality of her work after that, then you can be more blunt. 'You said you were interested in this sort of stuff and now you're saying it's not worth your bother. What's going on?'
I do think you're going to end up in a position where you're firing her if it really is a personality mismatch between the work and her. You can fix a lot of problems in someone's work, but I've never seen someone fix an attitude to get someone who's not invested in their work invested. I've seen them provide environments that better suit the person, tasks that better suit the person, even provide examples of good attitude and a guiding word here and there... never seen someone change someone just not being interested in something though.
In extremely blunt condensed form? My feeling is that you can have a girlfriend or you can have an employee, but you can't treat your employees like your girlfriends or your girlfriends like your employees without a significant trade-off being involved. Companies aren't counselling services for their workers.