Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy (4 page)

why it’s so hard to change other people

Our internal, genetic wiring is like the hardware on a computer. You can change hardware, but it’s expensive and time-consuming. This genetic wiring drives much, although not all, of our personality and behavior. Current psychological theoretical consensus is that about 50 percent of our personality and natural behavior is hardwired. The other half is like the software we’re running—it’s a combination of life experience, training and education, and perhaps, the personal growth, spiritual, or psychological work we’ve done (or been forced to do) to try to change or evolve.

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 Pissing Me Off!

a Match Made in who-knows-where

One thing I’ve learned in my numerous years of consulting with conflict-ridden companies is that it’s next to impossible to change another person’s hardware, and it’s also very difficult to get another person to consider running different software. It’s no picnic changing your own either. Part of the problem we have with the “difficult” people in our lives is what psychologists call “matching.” In the early days of modern psychology, much of the psychological world was explained by the Freudian belief that it all came down to good mothers and bad mothers. Good moms were able to raise good kids. Bad moms weren’t. However, matching theory debunked that notion. Psychologists now know that much parenting success is simply due to the degree to which parent and child personalities are compatible. A gregarious mom, for example, may be driven batty by an introverted child who is shy, sensitive, and clings to her when confronted by others, regardless of whether those people are friends or strangers. Unless the mom is extraordinarily sensitive and evolved, she will spend her child’s life trying to change an introvert into an extrovert. One of life’s greatest challenges is to let the people around us be who they are. This becomes even more difficult if we work with people whose personalities do not match up well with our own. Part of our dilemma also may relate to what psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow. His theory (vastly oversimplified here) is that every person has strengths, or what some call our

“light side,” and weaknesses, or what he called “the shadow,”

and what others have called our dark side. Most of us lead with our light side and try to hide, deny, and/or repress our dark side. Frequently, in life, we find ourselves engaged in mirroring, which means that we find others who reflect our own

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02.
  What the Hell Is Your Problem? (Maybe It’s You) repressed dark side. That reflection is so personally troubling that we respond with annoyance or anger.

What is the solution to this? It’s to uncover our own dark and light sides and find healthy ways to express them (such as conversations with friends; therapy; or artistic endeavors), while acknowledging that everyone has dark and light sides, which may simply be a very bad match for ours. If we line up our dark side with someone else’s, particularly in a work environment, clashes are utterly predictable. But, you may protest, the person who is annoying you has totally gone over to the dark side. He has become the Darth Vader of your work group, without a single redeeming quality. I’ve got to challenge you on that. Even the original Darth Vader from the
Star Wars
movies had his surprisingly good points. He was originally Anakin Skywalker, Luke Skywalker’s father, and he was one of the good guys. He went over to the dark side to save Luke’s mother, became Darth Vader, forgot who he really was and then, at the end, became good again to save Luke from the evil Emperor Palpatine, but he was mortally wounded and died after gazing upon his son’s face for the first and only time.

I must admit that George Lucas’ zigs and zags in the series sometimes lost me, but his underlying message rings true: We never know what others have been through in their lives or what they’re currently experiencing. Almost every person has goodness within that we can tap if we dig deep enough. Just a glimpse of that can keep us going in our quest to figure out how to work with each person productively.

In rare cases, a matching problem is so bad that there is no choice but to walk away (see Chapter 17). However, this is a last resort and one you shouldn’t take until you’ve tried many, many other solutions! Quitting your job because you don’t like

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 Pissing Me Off!

your colleagues is an expensive solution—financially, professionally, and emotionally. Why am I insisting that you try so hard to work with a person you perceive as particularly monstrous? Because every workplace has them. You can keep changing jobs to avoid difficult people, but you never know where they’ll pop up again. Learning how to work with challenging people ranks right up there with technical jobs skills. Trust me on this one. You’ll use these techniques throughout your working career, no matter on what planet you land.
difficult people versus difficult Behavior

Before you can deal with the difficult coworker at your workplace, you need to decide what’s difficult. Missing keys? Batmen on the prowl? Is it you or them? It’s usually helpful to separate the behavior from the person. It’s not your child or your in-laws that you hate (okay, maybe it
is
the in-laws); it’s usually a behavior that sends you into fits. Sometimes, people don’t even recognize what it is that bugs them about someone. As one of my friends, in the midst of marital discord, wailed,

“Even the way he breathes drives me crazy!”

If you’ve allowed someone else’s problem behavior to go on too long, it can push you to the brink of disaster. Not good. This is because it creates a negative spiral of conflict. If you ignore conflict long enough, it spirals down to a very dark place. At that point, you develop what psychologists refer to as “selective perception.” Everything someone does drives you nuts at that point. You lose your ability to see the other person as just another struggling human being. Instead, you see him or her as all dark or all light—that “all light” stage is usually called infatuation, while the “all dark” stage has you

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02.
  What the Hell Is Your Problem? (Maybe It’s You) convinced that your colleague is evil incarnate! If, for example, you’re in a long-standing conflict with Joe and you see Mary and Joe chatting together in the hall, who do you assume that they’re talking about? You, of course. At this point, you can’t even see Joe as a person. Everything he does is suspect. That’s why it’s critical to address conflict with coworkers early and often. And of course, with sufficient skill. If you wait too long, the situation becomes nearly intractable. Later chapters in this book will give you a boatload of skills to manage the most difficult kinds of behavior. First, though, we have to answer the essential question of whether it is your stress or theirs that’s driving this muddle.

whose stress is it anyway?

One of the toughest issues is how to decipher whether the “difficult” person is actually creating the problem you’re experiencing or whether you are so stressed that the only thing left to do is to blame the difficult person for
your
problem. One simple tool that will help you determine whether you’re blaming someone or simply holding him or her accountable is to take the now-famous study from Dr. Thomas H. Holmes and Dr. Richard H. Rahe. The duo created a do-it-yourself stress test.

Banking on the well-documented theory that change causes stress, they examined the stress measured by Life Changes (LCU), ranging from the death of a spouse to receiving a traffic ticket. By adding the LCU values of the past year, you have a rough measure of the likelihood of a stress-related illness or accident, not to mention the odds of crankiness! Using the following list, simply add up the values for the events that have occurred in your life in the last twelve months.

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Life StreSS

VaLue

Death of a spouse

100

Divorce

73

Marital separation

65

Detention in jail or institution

63

Death of a close family member

63

Major personal injury or il ness

53

Marriage

50

Being fired at work

47

Marital reconciliation

45

Retirement

45

Major change in health or behavior of a family member

44

Pregnancy

40

Sexual difficulty

40

Gaining a new family member through birth, adoption, or remarriage 39

Major business readjustment

39

Major change in financial state

38

Death of a close friend

37

Change to a different line of work

36

Major increase in fights with spouse

35

Taking on a mortgage

31

Foreclosure on a mortgage or loan

30

Major change in responsibility at work

30

Son or daughter leaving home

29

In-law troubles

29

Outstanding personal achievement

28

Spouse begins to cease work outside of home

26

Major change in living condition (rebuilding, remodeling) 25

Revision of personal habits

24

Troubles with superior, boss

23

Major change in working hours, conditions

20

Major change in church activities

19

Major change in social activities

18

Purchasing a new car, or other big item

17

Major change in sleeping habits

16

Major change in number of family get-togethers

15

Major change in eating habits

15

Vacation

13

Christmas or holiday observance

12

Minor violations of the law

11

Scoring

Below 150
= 30 percent chance of il ness or accident within two years
151–299
= 50 percent chance of il ness or accident
over 300
= 80 percent chance of il ness or accident

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02.
  What the Hell Is Your Problem? (Maybe It’s You) According to Holmes and Rahe’s statistical prediction model, a score of 150 or less means a relatively low (about 30

percent) probability of stress-related illness (including heart attack, cancer, stroke, and so on). A score of 151 to 299 implies a 50 percent probability, and a score of 300 or above implies an 80 percent probability of experiencing a health change—usually a negative change. Obviously, these predictions are not absolute. Stress and the resulting health problems are the consequence of many different factors, including how significant those life events are to you, your personal resiliencies, and the support available through family, work, and friends. Taking this quiz, however, can give you some insight into the potential risks to your health and well-being. If your score is high on this test, you are likely—unless you’re extraordinarily well put together—to be cranky at work! When you’re irritable, you can’t deal well with anyone, but you are especially at a deficit in dealing with those who get under your skin.

The simple fact is that working with other people remains inherently stressful. In fact, people problems are now the top cause for workplace stress, so you’re not alone, according to ComPsych, a Chicago-based employee assistance program. Their StressPlus survey for the second half of 2006 shows 30

percent of those surveyed citing “people issues” as the cause of stress, replacing workload for the first time.

Many people, however, continue to think that work should be stress free. One of my favorite cases is one that a guy in California won in the late 1980s because he claimed he felt uncomfortable at work. In the late 1990s (after a decade of too many silly workplace cases), the same court heard a case from another man who tried to claim that he felt uncomfortable at work. The court said something like: “Get out of here. You’re supposed to feel uncomfortable at work. That’s why we call it work!”

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 Pissing Me Off!

Before you can begin to decide if it’s your coworker who is causing the problem, or it’s your own attitude that needs adjusting, you need an accurate assessment of your own stress level. You also need compassion for the stress your coworker may be facing.

An insightful exercise is to take the stress test for someone else. Based upon what you know about the major life events that person has experienced during the past year, where do you believe he or she falls on the stress test levels? If both you and that person are off the charts, you can see how easily collisions can occur.
ending Bad days Forever

Ever had a bad day? Perhaps a little too much stress at home, or road rage on the way to work, and then bam, first thing, you run into Mr. Least Favorite employee at the coffee pot, and he has just taken the last cup without making more!

Sometimes, however, we have not just bad days but terrible, horrible days. Days when our coworkers or bosses are engaging in behavior that’s not just difficult but over the line into workplace legal or policy violations. How so you know when someone’s way out of bounds? The next chapter will help. your