Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy (2 page)

your

relationship toolbox

How to Move froM PiSSed off to Powerful

PiSSed off

Powerful

Searching for a place without

Accepting that difficult people work

difficult people

everywhere

Thinking that working with

Recognizing that dealing with people is

difficult people is rocket science a skill you can learn, not a matter of luck or fate

Assuming that learning how to

Focusing on the bottom-line benefits

work with people isn’t important to you and your organization of gaining these skil s

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01.

WHAT’S WiTH ALL THE BiTCHiNG

AND MOANiNG?

How to understand workplace stress.

In the 2006 movie
Crash,
tempers flare. Racial epithets are hurled. Iranian, Korean, black, and white crash into each other, and so do their cultures. The characters all make assumptions about each other. Don Cheadle, who plays an African American detective, reflects on the alienation that is palpable in his world: “It’s the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know. You brush past people. People bump into you. In LA, nobody touches you . . . I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.”

It seems like today, wherever you go, people are angry. Rudeness is rampant and it’s a rare day when you aren’t the target of someone’s ire. People snap at you as you order your triple venti, no-foam latte at Starbucks. They’re annoyed at how you drive. They get out of bed unhappy and come to work agitated. They take it out on their coworkers, their neighbors, or their spouse. It’s a vicious cycle that goes around and around. In this chapter, I am going to help you gain insight into the world of workplace stress.

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stop
 Pissing Me Off!

why is everyone so crabby at work?

Yes, most people today are angry about something—and they’re wearing that hostility on their sleeves. Moreover, people seem unable to express that anger on their own time. One of the characters in the movie
Crash
, played by Sandra Bullock, expresses her frustration. Her voice cracks as she says,

“I’m angry all the time and I don’t know why.” Unfortunately, the workplace has become a toxic dump for people’s annoyances, agitation, and all-out bad behavior. E-mails to my Web site,
www.workplacesthatwork.com
,
as well as my audiences’

responses tell me that we’re facing a virtual epidemic of workplace meanness. Consider these stats: 1. Surveys show that two-thirds of individuals feel burnout on the job. 2. More than half of workers say they work under a great deal of stress.

3. The top source of stress? Difficult coworkers!

It’s no surprise that this one-two-three punch creates a triple threat of short tempers, annoyance, and general crabbiness. Just when you’re completely burned out, some coworker acts like a jerk.

You probably have your own personal list of people whose behaviors chap your cheeks. It could include loud talkers, screamers, slackers, whiners, gum-smackers, and so much more! The consensus in the March 2006 Randstad survey of 2,318 employed adults on the topic of workplace etiquette (which might be an oxymoron) revealed that:

n 32 percent of employees listed “loud talkers” as one of their biggest pet peeves in the office.

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

n 45 percent of those polled said condescending tones were the worst.

n 37 percent found public reprimands at work particularly irritating.

Micromanaging struck a nerve with 34 percent of the respondents, even more than cell phones ringing (30 percent), use of speakerphones in public areas (22 percent), and using PDAs during meetings (9 percent). And 11 percent of those polled hate it when colleagues engage in personal conversations in the workplaces. The Associated Press also collected its own Top Ten List of Annoying Behaviors. Can you believe that some of this stuff really is tolerated? Check it out: 1. The manager who tried to get employees in another department fired for eating bagels that were to be served at a meeting the next day. (My question is, what’s up

with the manager—day-old bagels?!)

2. The coworker who constantly e-mails the person who is sitting right next to her.

3. The coworker who sits in a crowded cubicle area and puts conversations on speakerphone, including those

that detail after-hours exploits better left unexposed. 4. The boss who cuts his fingernails while standing in his employee’s cube.

5. The coworker who steals other people’s food from the lunchroom refrigerator.

6. The coworker who unilaterally decided to change his job title to look more important.

7. The boss who swears at the top of his lungs and occasionally throws his chair or phone down the hall. 8. The coworker who walks up and randomly scratches other people’s backs.

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 Pissing Me Off!

9. The coworker who was caught sleeping on the job more than once and who insisted he was praying every time.

10. The coworker who greeted fellow employees (before the poor souls even had a cup of joe) with the sarcastic welcome, “Are you ready for another fun and
exciting
day?”

I understand workplace woes. I once worked for a brilliant but temperamental manager who habitually yanked his entire phone set out of the wall and threw it across the room. It engendered the post–Cold War duck-and-cover move among his subordinates. I found out recently that on a rare day when he actually used his phone to talk to someone, he called over to the facilities people and asked for a ladder. Anxious to avoid a blowup with the boss, the facilities employee double-timed it to the boss’s office. The boss took the ladder from him, climbed up to the top, removed a ceiling tile, and yanked out the intercom system because he was so annoyed at its constant interruptions! This little fit of pique cost the firm $10,000 to repair!

While ripping out the intercom system is an outrageous behavior, it’s possible to at least understand the source of it. What’s your limit? When do you say, as the frustrated broadcaster in the movie
Network
urged the world to do, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more?”

road rage at work:

why there’s hostility in the hallways

Remember the good old days, when road rage happened only on the freeway? Today, rage has ramped up to include the triggers of cell phones, computers, neighbors, even “disrespecting” looks, say police officers in Milwaukee, where arguments

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

are now the leading cause of homicides. Wow. Simple arguments now end in death. While it’s certainly not in the same category as murder, it’s not surprising that in poll after poll, Americans say civility is dead. When did good manners die?

Perhaps the niceness slide began in the 1990s, when personalities such as Judge Judy, Rush Limbaugh, and Don Imus were given high TV ratings for shaming and taking potshots in the name of entertainment. On cable, commentators including Bill O’Reilly perfected the putdown punch. Reality TV is a barrage of verbal and physical abuse. It’s the modern-day matchup between Christians and lions at a Roman circus. Another possible explanation for the increase in behavior that some may consider offensive is the speed of today’s communication.
wireless insolence

Perhaps the wireless tether has people poised for attack. Instant messaging, cell phones, blogs, online shopping, Internet chatrooms, and iPods provide a 24/7 stream of noise, interruptions, multitasking opportunities, and overload. The instantaneous nature of the communication allows us to shoot off an ill-conceived idea, an inflammatory message, a momentary meltdown, or a half-cocked thought without batting an eye. It’s too easy.

The problem is, out of the 60,000 or so thoughts we have every day, most are not fit for sharing. We’ve lost our internal “pause” buttons—all impulse control is out the window!

We no longer think
before
speaking or writing. Yet, speak and write we do, burdening others with thousands of lame thoughts, insensitive remarks, and other unsavory unspeakable offenses. Technology has allowed us to broadcast our cheap shots 24/7.

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 Pissing Me Off!

Nancy Ann Jeffrey of
The Wall Street Journal
writes that America’s etiquette epidemic may be the “dark side of the New Economy.” She opines that boorish behavior is the product of an e-culture that “glorifies speed over decorum and innovation over tradition.” It also glorifies communicating before reflecting. Just because we have an enormous number of thoughts every day doesn’t mean that anyone else needs or wants to hear them. Columnist George Will of
The Washington Post
chimes in on the subject, noting that when it comes to pagers, cell phones, text messaging, and video games, children and adults behave the same. “These arrested-development thirteen-yearolds do not distinguish between being in private and being in public. Wherever they are, they are the center of the universe,”

he writes. Naturally, this culture of rudeness spills into the workplace, making the normal civility that cushions us from the slings and arrows of barbaric behavior a thing of the past.
the architecture of annoyance

What’s contributing to this souped-up, high-amp culture of annoyance? The very structure of our brain. Yep, the brain is malleable, and we’re creating pathways that facilitate rapid response to annoying behaviors. Modern neuroscience is now confirming what ancient yogis knew and taught: The mind is like an untrained monkey, plunging down jungle paths toward bananas and coconuts whether we need them or not.

Unless we train ourselves to pause, and become aware of our feelings, thoughts, and reactions, we will be hijacked by forces beyond our conscious mind all day long. In addition to the five senses of taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound, yogis talked about a sixth sense—thoughts. These include memories and feelings as well as what we usually consider thoughts. With more than

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60,000 of these thoughts a day—not to mention the constant sound, smell, and light show from our other senses—we’re bombarded. If that weren’t enough, we now have an electronic deluge that no other generation has ever experienced. Suddenly, we simply respond to stimuli as if we’re part of a Pavlovian experiment; as a society, we’re walking around either stupefied or reactive. As both yogis and modern neuroscience have discovered, the same sequence occurs after a thought enters the brain. Each input is first “recognized,” and then it is “appraised” or labeled as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Our consciousness then reacts to these stimuli: if pleasant, we react with attraction; if unpleasant, we react with aversion. Then comes the final link: action. If we don’t like the stimulus, we push away; if we’re attracted, we lunge toward the object of our affection. Appraisal. Impulse. Action. We go through this triple filter a zillion times a day. It’s as though our brains are trapped in a perpetual Xbox Arcade; we’re virtually careening through these states and reacting or avoiding all over the machine of life. Unless the mind is finally trained to pause, and we breathe and relax into the stimulus, we simply react without thinking. A radical discovery made by both yogis and modern cognitive therapy is this: We don’t have to react. It is possible to experience both pain and pleasure without reacting.
what does that Mean to Me?

What does all this have to do with why everyone is so crabby at work? The constant bombardment of stimuli flung at us by our high-tech, instant gratification world creates a brain on overload. Our brains are simply trying to deal with stimuli as fast as they’re coming in, so there’s a strong propensity to react without reflection. The brain is trying to cope with a

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 Pissing Me Off!

preposterously out-of-control “to-do” list. You know the feeling. You recognize the frustration of always having too many things to do. Naturally, people lash out at coworkers or anyone else who gets in the way. If you happen to be the recipient of someone else’s rage or frustration, it probably makes you want to turn in the opposite direction or strike back. It’s the old fight-or-flight choice. It’s rare that a person chooses to stand and defuse the situation, creating a more productive outcome and an enriched relationship with a colleague. In upcoming chapters, you’ll see how you can control your own part of the interaction, even if others are spinning out of control.