Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy (3 page)

BOOK: Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy
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using the power of creative conflict

The other biggie that causes crabbiness on the job is the Big C: conflict. Most of us hate it, but did you know that we have to have conflict? Most of us don’t know why in the world we’d want to have it, or how to deal with conflict appropriately. You can read more about the inherent power of creative conflict and how to embrace it in my book
The Power of a Good Fight: Embracing
Conflict to Drive Creativity, Productivity and Innovation.
The good news is that using conflict productively is a learned skill. You don’t have to have natural talent. You don’t have to be born with a conflict management gene. Learn the skills; harness the power of creative conflict, and that bitching and moaning will all but disappear. Really. Learn how to have a good fight. There is absolutely more conflict in most workplaces today than ever before. A more diversified work force, an unbelievably cutthroat competitive environment, rapid technological advancements, international conflict, and the chronic squeeze to do more with less has people pretty worked up. You’d think

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01.
  What’s With All the Bitching and Moaning?

with all that going on, we’d figure out how to perfect the art of the “good fight.” A good fight is one that is:

1. Open, not closed—people admit there’s a conflict 2. About ideas, not personalities

3. Where people value the creative potential of conflict 4. Where people skillfully manage their emotions

Sounds like a fight from another planet, doesn’t it? Most people have bad fights. Dreadful fights. People are stuck in unproductive battles about personalities, the past, or “beyond”

issues—things that are beyond the power of the people in the room to solve, usually structural issues such as budget limitations or lines of authority. These unproductive conflicts cause the combatants to snipe, snarl, and snivel at each other, leading to road rage in the hallways.
escaping the rage trap

What is the way out of this trap?

First,
people need to realize that conflict is an inevitable part of life. Most conflict originates because we believe that someone or something is just not fair. It’s a legitimate observation. Life
isn’t
fair. Hence, conflict is inevitable.
Second,
most people have not prepared for conflict; they have not created the deep connections with those they work with, nor discussed how they intend to resolve inevitable conflicts when they arise. Most workers have not studied conflict, nor have they practiced the skills of a “good fight” as they would practice if they wanted to improve their game, knit a better sweater, or produce a snappier PowerPoint presentation. You can learn the rules and outcomes if you work on it.

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stop
 Pissing Me Off!

Third,
most of us have not realized that all people have a particular “personality style” when they are in conflict. It’s the way they respond when they feel pressured, or when their backs are to the wall. Think of your mom when she’d get angry when you were a kid. There was a predictable set of behaviors. You could feel it coming. You knew exactly what your mom was going to do when she reached her limit. Like your mom, most people are creatures of habit. They respond in predictable ways until they get better skills! Changing another person’s style is about as easy as convincing a leopard to change her spots, but what you can do is learn how to recognize and work with different styles.

Last,
but certainly not least, we need to recognize that most people do not have a deep and abiding purpose in life, one that’s wide enough and strong enough to carry them over the rough spots of working through conflicts. Managing conflict is work, and you need to have a higher purpose—a bigger goal that makes it worthwhile to persevere through a difficult conflict. What’s a worried and worked-up worker to do? Never fear. If you plow through the whos, whats, wheres, and whens of this book, you’ll know what to do, and why. But first, we need to untangle one preliminary muddle: Who causes all these bad days at work? Is it us, or them?

your

relationship toolbox

How to Move froM PiSSed off to Powerful

PiSSed off

Powerful

Taking others’ crankiness

Recognizing your own and others’ stress

personal y

Assuming conflict is

Accepting conflict as a part of every

dysfunctional

workplace

Ignoring conflict

Learning how to approach conflict

proactively and productively

Conflict about personalities

Conflict about ideas

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02.

WHAT THE HELL iS YOur PrOBLEM?

(MAYBE iT’S YOu)

How to identify whether you or they are

the problem.

One summer Saturday night, I was sitting in a café called Wonderview at the top of Coal Creek Canyon, just north of where I live in Golden, Colorado. Suddenly, a 250-pound guy, in a Batman getup, leaped from behind the trailer across the road! He darted in and out of the pines and then evaporated into the cabin behind the trailers, intent upon some secret rescue mission.

“Batman!” I exclaimed. A few diners glanced up and then went back to slurping margaritas and crunching on chips and salsa.

“Oh yeah,” my friend muttered. “I’ve seen him before. He comes out on Saturday nights to entertain people.”

“But who is he? What’s he doing here?

“Who knows?” My friend, who lives in the canyon and is unfazed by its many eccentric characters, shrugged.

what, exactly, does it Mean to Be difficult?

While longtime canyon residents shrugged off the antics of this would-be Batman as Saturday night entertainment, I was

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stop
 Pissing Me Off!

left to ponder how this diverse crowd would handle his eccentric behavior if they knew him in another context. Would the residents of Denver’s tonier suburbs tolerate Batman leaping about every Saturday night in their neighborhood? Would it be difficult if he were a part of their family? A neighbor? An employee? A colleague? Is the would-be Batman difficult or just different?

Our decisions about who and what is difficult depends totally on context and our own worldview. Recently, I was talking to one of my colleagues, Bill, about marriage and its many difficulties. “Marriage is hard,” he agrees. “Jean has been driving me crazy.”

“What does she do?” I asked.

“She’s always losing her keys; it drives me nuts!”

Compared to other marital woes, griping about misplaced keys seemed just petty, but to him, it’s crazy-making. When I think about the fact that Bill is compulsively organized, I could see that waiting around while Jean searches endlessly for the elusive keys would be beyond maddening.

How about you? Can you tolerate eccentric batmen and missing keys? Do you sweat the small stuff, or do you understand that really, as author Richard Carlson reminded us, it’s almost all small stuff? That’s not to say that people don’t want excellence. Of course, you want to be on a high-performing team. Of course, you want to be surrounded by brilliant, competent people who are also kind and charming and know exactly what to say and when not to speak at all. But, we are on planet Earth, so
stuff happens
. Even if you’re surrounded by high-flying extraordinary colleagues, they may drive you nuts! The truth is, that may be more a matter of your own issues—not theirs. In most workplaces, there
are
truly difficult people who drive everyone batty. Even the Dalai Lama, when pressed on the issue of whether force should be used around the globe,

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02.
  What the Hell Is Your Problem? (Maybe It’s You) responded in a recent interview that yes, sometimes you do have to use force because there are “rascals afoot in the world.”

However, whether we see rascals or terrorists may be a matter of our perspective or our place in life.

how do you define difficult?

How do you decide who is truly difficult? A good test is this: Does the person’s behavior have an impact on your individual or team performance? If not, it’s eccentric, “rascally” behavior and you need to manage your own attitude. You’re not dealing with a truly difficult person who needs to be monitored and managed.

If the person is keeping you from doing your best work, it may be because of what you’re doing. Ask yourself if it is because you’re engaged in “taking their inventory, not yours,”

as they say in twelve-step groups. Are you focusing on their faults, instead of spending your energy more productively by improving your own behavior?

shrug it oFF

Sometimes, it’s worthwhile to revert to that time-honored teen behavior: the shrug. Pretend for a moment that you are a self-absorbed adolescent, and you’ll find that you can simply shrug and look the other way. It’ll probably even feel great!

Suppose the shrug is unsuccessful. Suppose that the other person really is keeping you and your team from doing your best work. Assume also that you’ve done your level best to ignore him or her—to no avail. It’s time to get serious about a solution. The first step is diagnosis.

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stop
 Pissing Me Off!

diagnosing diFFerences

This can get dicey. Sometimes, difficult people are some of your best performers. “A” players can be egotistical, demanding, and divisive to morale. Highly intelligent people are often frustrated by those who don’t grasp concepts as readily as they do. The difficult person in your department may be a creative type who simply can’t conform to a conservative rule-bound workplace, or he or she may simply be in the wrong job. Conversely,
you
might be in the wrong job. If you’re in a field that requires a high level of creative energy, but you can’t tolerate eccentricity, you may be in the wrong work environment. For example, one of my executive coaching clients, Bob, came to me about John, one of the junior partners in their high-tech consulting firm. None of Bob’s attempts to manage John’s idiosyncrasies over the last five years had worked. A software developer, no one could match John’s relentless and creative pursuit of the most elegant computer program design, but placing him in front of a new client or other employees led to frequent disaster. John eschewed socks and shirts with collars. He worked all night or not at all, turned up the speakers on his computer to play heavy metal music, and mumbled through presentations. Although frequently late with deadlines, his work was superlative. My frustrated client confessed that John was probably one of the top two or three designers in the world in his subject area.

After coaching from me, Bob finally realized that he needed to restructure his own management style in order to best utilize John. Bob stopped expecting him to meet with clients, gave up on the firm’s strict dress code, and softened his approach to office hours. As long as John and the others were producing results, they could work when they liked. They moved John’s office to an area where his music annoyed no one.

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02.
  What the Hell Is Your Problem? (Maybe It’s You) I did counsel Bob that he would probably always need to closely monitor John to keep him on task. This kind of micromanaging is not worth it for every employee, but for some highly creative and brilliant people it’s essential in order to utilize their special gifts.

Who was right here? Should Bob have had to change his own management style and expectations, or should John have

“changed his spots” in order to conform to Bob’s more conservative and orderly style?

As usual, no one was truly right. Every one of us has our own internal radar, some of which was set at birth; we’re genetically loaded to a certain extent to be organized or messy, punctual or distracted, sensitive to others or clueless. This doesn’t mean that we can’t change, but simply that we come into this world and our bodies (or our Batman costumes) differently. We can either let those differences drive us over the edge, or we can shrug and order another margarita. We can change the environment to accommodate someone’s gifts, or we can lose that person to a more accommodating workplace.

BOOK: Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy
4.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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