Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy (18 page)

Managing crusty customers and clients can be hard work. You need the support of all your coworkers to succeed. You’ll find customers or clients impossible if you’re working with

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09.
  How To Avoid Killing Outrageous Clients

slackers, know-it-alls, or people who explode. In the next chapter, we’ll cover techniques to manage them. your

relationship toolbox

How to Move froM PiSSed off to Powerful

PiSSed off

Powerful

Blowing up at a difficult client or Calming yourself down customer

Cutting off their emotions

Al owing them to ventilate

Accepting the client/customer

Inviting them to disclose the underlying

view of the problem

issue

Getting sucked into the details

Seeking the big-picture outcome

of the complaint

Meeting your own needs

Finding a solution that meets everyone’s

needs

Talking too much

Listening

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10.

HOW TO NAviGATE rOAD rAGErS,

SLACKErS, AND WHiNErS

You talkin’ to me?

Linda and Nancy have been colleagues for years. Yet Linda is about at the end of her rope with Nancy’s know-it-all nitpicking. A typical conversation goes something like this:
Linda:
“We need to talk about our strategy for the new ad campaign.”

nancy:
“First we need to decide on the paper color. I’ve found that we can save ten cents on flyers if we use pink instead of blue; last time you didn’t even consider pink!”

Linda:
“Before we get to paper, I’d like to agree on the big idea behind the campaign.”

nancy:
“But we have to decide about the paper today, the sale ends tomorrow. I found out that if we order online we have until midnight, and we can save an additional ten cents per ream if we use UPS instead of FedEx, and if you authorize it right now I can get our order in before noon which means they could deliver it . . .”

Linda:
“Stop with the paper already! We need to deal with the bigger issues first.”

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 Pissing Me Off!

nancy:
“Of course. I understand that getting the details right isn’t as important to you as it is to me. Don’t worry. I’ll just handle it myself.”

Linda:
(Fights every urge to throttle the living daylights out of Nancy.)

the know-it-all

Know-it-alls will drive you absolutely batty. They’re the employees, colleagues, or bosses who think it’s their place to do your job as well as their own. Their condescending tone and attitude is present in every conversation and interpersonal exchange. Still can’t spot them? They’re the ones who seem to want to be back in fourth grade, where they used to sit in the front row, furiously waving their hand, while insistently whining, “Call on me, call on me, call on me!”

Some people just can’t keep themselves from telling you, and everyone else, what they know. (And they know
every-
thing
.) They seem to think that you need their information now, whether or not their information pertains to the subject currently being discussed.

how to handle a know-it-all

Know-it-alls are in some ways contradictory: They want to feel superior, which often alienates them from peers and colleagues, yet at the same time they also crave being needed. It helps if you can use these people; for example, get them on projects that take up all their time. They’ll be convinced that what they’re doing is oh-so-important. It may also distract them enough to get them off your back.

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10.
  How to Navigate Road Ragers, Slackers, and Whiners I used to work with an attorney named Janice who truly did seem to know everything. This was in the dark ages before everyone kept subject files on the computer. She kept vast subject files on various legal issues in her desk. Everyone knew that you should start your research at Janice’s desk, not in the library. Luckily, she was generous with her time and advice. Many times, if someone like this pisses us off, it’s because of our own fears and inadequacies, not because of what they’re doing. Know-it-alls can be very competent, particularly with minutiae most people dismiss; thus, Janice sometimes rubbed people the wrong way because her extraordinary thoroughness highlighted others’ weaknesses. Use know-it-alls on projects for which details are critical: they’ll relish the role. Other times, know-it-alls can be an unnecessary pain in the process, and in your backside. Once, near the end of my tenure as a litigation attorney, I inadvertently left something off a pre-trial filing. Instead of filing a motion to ask the court if I could add it, I simply called the young opposing attorney to ask for her permission. Before granting the request, she put me through an inquisition! “Why did you not include this in your previous filing?” she kept asking in various ways.

“Because we made a mistake,” I responded casually. This seemed to inflame her suspicion. She could not believe that we had simply made a mistake, and hadn’t orchestrated it for some other nefarious purpose. Round and round we went. Finally, I gave up and filed a request with the court, which was, as most such routine requests were, routinely granted. I am fairly certain that the reason she had trouble understanding the whole exchange was that she was a classic know-it-all who believed that
she
would never make such a mistake and thus felt justified questioning my motives and creating unnecessary work. In situations like this, your only option may be to grit your teeth (as I did) and jump through the hoop.

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 Pissing Me Off!

what drives the know-it-all?

People who are the workplace know-it-all have the need to feel in control of their environment, usually as a way of medicating their own anxiety about their inadequacies. Since you are in their environment, that includes controlling you too. This can be annoying, even enraging, if you’re the constant victim of all this “helping.” Again, the best way to deal with these bozos is to do your best to not take it personally. Ignore their behavior whenever you can, unless it has an impact on team or group performance. If it does have an impact on performance, you need to do your best to confront the issue skillfully and then to complain to your supervisor or HR if you don’t get results.
The detail-oriented know-it-all

Many know-it-alls have high IQs but such low EQs (levels of emotional intelligence) that they actually think people admire them for saying things like, “We can save ten cents on paper” when you’re still trying to nail down the big idea for a multimillion-dollar ad campaign. Detail-oriented know-it-alls don’t sit around memorizing amazing facts. Instead they correct others’ versions of events, often missing the whole point of a conversation in their obsessive focus on minutiae.

Detail-oriented know-it-alls can sustain conversations for inordinate amounts of time—all the while being oblivious to the irritation their monologue is engendering in those who are held hostage to it. Most of the time, work colleagues simply talk over them, though if you have a detail-oriented know-it-all in the next cube it helps to have earplugs available for emergencies.
Fixer know-it-alls

Another typical know-it-all behavior is that they insist on solving your problems for you, even if you don’t want them

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10.
  How to Navigate Road Ragers, Slackers, and Whiners solved, or, in fact, don’t think you have a problem at all. Fixer know-it-alls will persist in making recommendations, despite your best efforts to derail them. Even if you’re just venting, they will relish solving the problem. For example, when you’re musing about your marriage, she’ll suggest a new vitamin. If you know you’re right on the facts and they’re wrong, you can try to out-brain the brainiacs. This frequently leads to an all-out battle of the brains, however. A better way than wading into the IQ challenge is to approach the know-it-all at the level of EQ. Know-it-alls are weak as puppies in this area, so be gentle. In a soft, nonaggressive tone, say, “Pat, I think you’re showing off your knowledge to get acceptance. The thing is, that really doesn’t work. I just feel annoyed when you harp on information I never asked for.”

It’s always a good idea to put know-it-alls to work, doing what they do best. Know-it-alls want most of all to be of service. Recognize their offensive behaviors for what they are—manifestations of insecurity—and put them to work diagnosing your computer glitch, balancing the department’s budget, or figuring out why your janitor doesn’t empty the trash cans. No project is too big or too small for the typical know-it-all. What you don’t want is these people sitting around without a project, which just leads to them spending all their time critiquing your work. Instead, keep a list of all the work stuff you loathe and hand it off!

you snooze, you lose: shake up those slackers

Hate working with slackers? You’re in good company. In a recent study by Leadership IQ, a training and research company based in Washington, D.C., 87 percent of employees said that working beside low-performing colleagues had made them

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 Pissing Me Off!

want to change jobs. Further, 93 percent also claimed that working with low performers decreased their productivity.

“Low performers can feel like emotional vampires, sucking the energy out of everyone around them,” said Leadership IQ

chief executive Mark Murphy, whose company surveyed 70,305

employees, managers, and executives from 116 companies and organizations. Those surveyed were asked to list characteristics of a low performer. The top five characteristics were: 1. A negative attitude

2. A tendency to stir up trouble

3. Often blames others

4. Lacks initiative

5. Is incompetent

Low performers are often skilled in the art of work avoidance. They spend more time arguing their way out of tasks than it would take to simply complete them. They are good at identifying problems but not so good at finding solutions. They have well-crafted excuses for not getting anything done. And their sloth is often at the expense of more conscientious coworkers, who must pick up their slack.

Ironically enough, many slackers do not see themselves as slackers, preferring instead to blame others. Of the 87 percent of employees who want to get away from low performers, half are probably low performers themselves, if other surveys can be believed. For instance, more than half of American workers are not engaged in their jobs, according to a recent survey by Gallup. Most are “sleepwalking through their workdays.”

Gallup says. But 19 percent are what Gallup calls the “actively disengaged.” The 23 million “actively disengaged” U.S. workers cost the national economy more than 300 billion a year in lost productivity.

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10.
  How to Navigate Road Ragers, Slackers, and Whiners
dealing with slackers

In short, if companies hope to keep their best employees, they should dump their worst. Otherwise, low performers will start dictating the company’s culture; productivity, quality, and service will all decline precipitously, and high performers will avoid your company like the plague.

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch fired the bottom 10 percent of his work force each year. Welch used sports metaphors to justify this extreme practice, saying he wanted to work with A-team performers. He was roundly criticized as callous, but GE did flourish under his management. “I think the cruelest thing you can do to somebody is give them a head fake . . . nice appraisals . . . that’s called false kindness,” writes Welch in the book
The Jack Welch Lexicon of Leadership
. Most managers avoid addressing the problem of poor performers. When I teach management classes, for example, I routinely ask how many of them have someone on a performance improvement plan. Usually only 1 or 2 percent of them do, despite surveys that show at least 20 percent of the employees in any workplace perform poorly. There’s plenty of false kindness and management wimpiness going around. In the Leadership IQ survey, only 14 percent of senior executives said their company effectively managed low performers. And only 17 percent of middle managers said they feel comfortable removing low performers.