Leaders and Limits: How to Set Limits and Impose Consequences with Empathy, Attention and Respect
Leaders and Limits: How to Set Limits and Impose Consequences with Empathy, Attention and Respect © 2025 by Bill Eddy, LCSW, Esq. Leaders set the tone for the culture of their organizations. The leader plays a large role, whether one is a parent in a family; a manager or administrator at work; or head of a homeowners association, condo board, or city council. In order to maintain a healthy and motivated organization, it’s up to the leader to demonstrate how to set limits and impose consequences when necessary. Unfortunately, in today’s world of high-conflict people who regularly push the limits, many leaders are unprepared for this newly essential leadership task. This article addresses some of the issues about setting limits that leaders in organizations face and also describes our training called New Ways for Work® for Leaders. This article draws on some of the concepts described in our new book SLIC Solutions™ for Conflict: Setting Limits and Imposing Consequences in 2½ Steps, which can be helpful for anyone anywhere and will be available in November, 2025. High-Conflict Behavior High-conflict behavior includes a preoccupation with blaming others, a lot of all-or-nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, and extreme behaviors that 90% of people would never engage in. People with such behavior can show up anywhere in an organization and create difficulties, either as the lowest person in the pecking order, someone in the middle, or even those at or near the top. People with repeated patterns of high-conflict behavior may be 5-10% of adults, so that your likelihood of having to deal with them is very high. There appears to be an increase worldwide in high-conflict behavior since Covid. Take, for example, a low-level employee who is caught taking office supplies home that he doesn’t need for work. Or a manager who is selling real estate during his work time. Or a surgeon who screams at the nurses in the Operating Room that they are idiots. None of these behaviors are the end of the world and these workers may be very good at their jobs. But these behaviors are also problematic. Should a workplace leader intervene? And how should they do it? The Assertive Approach Many leaders have not been trained in management skills. Some of them tend to take a passive approach, which means they often avoid dealing with such problems because there are always more pressing priorities. They just don’t like to confront people and don’t want to make people angry at them. Other leaders take an aggressive approach, criticizing the employee personally and sometimes publicly. They question the employee’s competence, intelligence, commitment and personal morals. These leaders may believe that humiliating someone will motivate them to act better, although that rarely is the result except in movies and TV shows. The most successful leaders take an assertive approach. They don’t delay dealing with problems because they know that they may grow much worse. But they also don’t attack the person, they focus on behavior. They want to know the facts of the situation and then want to motivate behavior change once they have enough information. The SLIC Solutions method encourages this approach. Sooner Rather Than Later Setting limits and, when necessary, imposing consequences is better done sooner rather than later. In scenario after scenario of difficult organizational behavior we have addressed as High Conflict Institute, we have found that leaders have waited too long to deal with these situations; sometimes a year or two or three. In some cases, good employees have left because they saw that high-conflict behavior was tolerated, even when they reported it. In other cases, high-conflict employees have felt empowered by the lack of consequences and escalated their difficult behavior. In cases where organizations have been sued, it is not unusual to read the history and find that the problems went back several years before they were seriously confronted. Often this is because the organization wants to give the difficult person a chance—or two or three or four chances. Ironically, once high-conflict behavior reveals itself as a pattern of ongoing behavior, it is very unlikely to change. One of the characteristics of people with high-conflict personalities is that they rarely reflect on their own behavior (it’s always someone else’s fault) and they rarely change. Once this pattern is clear, perhaps after being given one chance to change that had no effect, there is little benefit in additional chances. Yet that means that leaders need to take uncomfortable action sooner. Let me reassure you it will be harder later on, not easier. Step 1: Setting Limits Most organizations have rules and policies that lay out what is acceptable behavior and what is not. Most employees follow the rules. Occasionally, a new situation arises that no one faced before so that the rules are not clear. However, the most common situation for setting limits today is that someone violates an obvious limit (like taking supplies, selling real estate during work hours, or screaming at nurses). In these situations, it makes sense for a leader to talk with the person and explain what the limit it. “Hey buddy. I heard you’re taking supplies home. If that’s true, that’s not allowed and you’ll get in trouble for that. So bring them back and don’t do that in the future. I’m just trying to help you out and give you the heads up. I want you to succeed here.” In some situations that’s all that it takes. However, with high-conflict people, that is usually not enough. They often just become more secretive or persistent in their negative behavior. What they really need is to know that there are clear and credible consequences waiting for them if they violate the limit. This is why we talk about SLIC: Setting Limits AND Imposing Consequences. Step 2: Imposing Consequences When you set a limit it helps to think through what the consequence will be if the person violates that limit. Then you can warn the person about the possible consequence when you