Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy (23 page)

Sometimes that’s not easy. One time, for example, I was dealing with a group of orthopedic surgeons who had been sued for harassing nurses in the operating room, were continuing to deal with high staff turnover because of their disrespectful behavior, and were at each others’ throats every day. As the session became more heated, the most severely abusive doctor became so frustrated with me that he started yelling about how they were surgeons, their jobs were stressful, and that this was “not a @#$% charm school!”

He kept escalating his rude remarks. I responded firmly and politely. He finally became so enraged that he stomped out of the session. Calmly, I continued on without him. Later that night, he called me at my hotel to apologize for his behavior. Since we were in a western state and I knew he’d understand what I meant, I just replied cheerily, “Oh that’s all right. Don’t worry. It’s not my first rodeo.”

“I suspected that it was not,” he replied, clearly chagrined. The next day, he returned to the meeting and behaved like a model student.

While it can be difficult to practice in the moment, charm wins in the long run. You should never be a doormat, and you should clearly know and enforce your own limits, but you can

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13.
  Be Charming Even If It Kills You

always do so in a civil way. Let me give you some examples of what I mean.

SPecific tActicS for rude BeHAvior

BeHAvior

civil reSPonSe

Yel ing and screaming Calmly saying, “I need you to speak in a normal voice. I can’t listen when you yel .”

Profanity

“I’m sure you didn’t mean to say that, but profanity

real y doesn’t work for me. Please choose other

language.”

Stomping out

Cal ing or meeting later and saying, “I know you

were upset, and I’m glad that you took a time-out,

but can we talk in a productive way now?”

Interrupting/talking “I know you have a lot of ideas and I appreciate your over you

passion but I can’t keep track of the conversations

if you keep interrupting me. Please stop.”

Condescending tone “I’m sure that you didn’t intend that the way it sounded but I felt real y diminished when you said

what you did. I need you to respect my experience

and expertise and how hard I’ve been working to

figure this out. Please try to talk to me in a kind

way.”

Of course, some people just behave this way on a regular basis, and you may need to constantly remind them of your limits. Using the 1-2-3-Go! technique of making requests for different behavior in Chapter 6 will also help set limits with someone who refuses to respect you. If all of your attempts fail, of course, you’ll have to appeal to a higher authority, as outlined in Chapter 16.

In your interactions with the misbehaving person, as well as your manager or HR when and if you have to complain, keep in mind one important rule: You do have the right to be treated with respect at work. This is true even if you’ve made a mistake or done something wrong. You can, and should, correct any errors and apologize when you mess up, but you need

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 Pissing Me Off!

to remember your limits: you don’t give abuse and you don’t tolerate it from others.

your

relationship toolbox

How to Move froM PiSSed off to Powerful

PiSSed off

Powerful

Fighting fire with fire

Remaining civil, even when others are

not

Yel ing, screaming, profanity

Using strong, dignified language

Tolerating abuse

Setting clear boundaries against bad

treatment

Bad manners

Civility

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14.

HOW TO SHiNE AT ANY JOB AND WHY

YOu SHOuLD

Great expectations.

After he returned from serving in the Marines in Vietnam, Bill started out working as a pizza delivery person. Bill was a college dropout, and the words of his MD/JD father rang in his ears as he made his deliveries: “You never finished college! You’re just a screwup!” Still, Bill liked working. He was good with people, a natural salesperson, a quick study, and attentive to details. Bill’s manager quickly promoted him to assistant manager. When that manager left, Bill took over as manager. His store’s sales climbed. Next thing he knew, he was managing nine pizza stores. He attracted the attention of the head of a major hotel chain, who hired him to help run the front desk of one of his hotels. Soon, Bill was managing that hotel and steadily working his way up the promotion ladder. He recently retired after serving as the senior vice president of operations. The secret of his success? Doing his very best every day at every job.

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the value of doing your current Job well

If you’re going to be a street sweeper, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., be the Michelangelo of Street Sweepers. King preached in the value of the dignity of all work. You may not like your job now, but there’s always value in doing a good job, even if you’re surfing Monster.com looking for a better alternative. Consider the life story of Chris Gardner, played by Will Smith in the movie
The Pursuit of Happyness
. Gardner took an unpaid internship at the bottom of the heap in a Wall Street brokerage firm. As the first black salesperson at the firm, he had a lot to prove. While living on the street with his young son, he worked hard every day and overcame tremendous obstacles, eventually becoming one of the firm’s top producers. The message he preaches in the motivational speeches he gives today is simple: Do your best wherever you are.

At this point you may be snarling, “What does all this motivational talk have to do with people pissing you off at work?”

Everything! It’s darn near impossible not to snap at the kook in the next cube if you hate every minute of your job and feel that what you do doesn’t matter.

there are no small parts, only small actors

Do you think that every person who reached great heights started out at the top or worked with easy coworkers? Consider Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the leading figures of the Renaissance. Besides his abilities as a painter, he was a superb draftsman, sculptor, architect, engineer, and writer. His notebooks are filled with scientific musings and mechanical inventions that were centuries ahead of their time. “Knowing how to see”

was his mantra. He wrote that he spent his days trying hard to

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14.
  How to Shine at Any Job and Why You Should see whatever was in front of him, instead of worrying about the next artistic commission.

Da Vinci’s first job at age fifteen was as an apprentice to the artist Andrea del Verrocchio, a notorious, temper-tantrum-throwing prima donna. Despite his formidable talent, Da Vinci was relegated to mixing paints. How did Da Vinci rise to such heights despite such menial work? Perhaps it was his focus on seeing the opportunities (however humble) that were right in front of him, instead of complaining about those that were not there.

doing your Job impeccably will always serve you

Can all jobs have dignity and meaning? Yes, I believe they can. If you don’t believe me, review Viktor Frankl’s book,
Man’s
Search for Meaning
, in which he talks about his time as a prisoner in a concentration camp. His “job” was caring for the bodies after the victims had been gassed or otherwise executed. Sometimes the dead piled up in great heaps; an unimaginable, horrible sight! Yet, Frankel approached his duties with dignity and care, lovingly attending to each body as a religious act. He knew the one great truth: Our oppressors can take away everything from us except our own freedom of thought and our dignity.

The Dalai Lama tells a similar story about a Tibetan monk who was jailed and tortured by the Chinese for many years after they took over Tibet. When asked if he was ever frightened, the monk replied: “Yes, one time. I was in danger of losing my compassion for the Chinese.”

Now, of course, we can’t all expect to carry the enlightenment and equanimity of a Tibetan monk or Viktor Frankl, but we can treat our own work as something important, and even

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sacred, if we have that kind of spiritual orientation. There are few things more motivating than viewing our daily rounds as a kind of service to something higher and greater than our own lives.

As Rhonda Britten, author of
Fearless Living
, puts it:

“Complaining only exacerbates the problem by focusing your attention on what is wrong in your life rather than focusing on taking actions to solve it or accepting the situation as is and finding peace with it.”

Complaining drains our energy. If we can see our work—no matter how lowly—in a larger context, that will always serve us. One way to do that is to simply focus on each day as an act of service, as Martin Luther King Jr. stressed.

If you want to shine at your job—and be happier in the process—look for ways in which your being there serves others. For example, you may be a humble assistant, but what if your smile and pleasant “good morning” is what brightens up a dismal colleague’s day? Look for small ways to serve in any position you are in.

Finding Meaning in the Mundane

What’s the real way to make work meaningful? By having a larger purpose that’s big enough and wide enough to encompass your life at work or at home. For example, my larger purpose is always to build relationships and to lessen the distance between people. That always helps me to stay “on purpose”

wherever I am and guides all that I do and say. Even though I get as tired and cranky as everyone else, having a purpose helps motivate me to keep on trucking on my worst days. Similarly, writer and long-time Zen Buddhist practitioner Natalie Goldberg, in her writing about her teacher, Katagiri

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14.
  How to Shine at Any Job and Why You Should Roshi, in the book
The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk,
and My Unlikely Path to Truth,
details the challenge of rising every day at 4:00 a.m. to sit still and meditate in the Zendo. Yet rise and sit Goldberg did—all through her thirties she sat still. As Goldberg puts it: “an age when others were investing their energy in building careers, a vast opportunity was presented to me—to meet my own mind and ‘to have kind consideration for all sentient beings every moment forever.’” That larger purpose kept Goldberg going. Nat sat on, guided by Roshi’s three great teachings:

n Continue under all circumstances

n Don’t be tossed away—don’t let anything stop you

n Make positive effort for the good

Whatever your spiritual orientation, these are principles that you can apply to your work situation.

practical tips to stay on purpose in any Job

The reality of most jobs is that you
do
have to deal with difficult coworkers, bosses, clients, and customers, and you may not receive the tangible things you want in every job—the big title, big money, prestige, location, and fulfillment. You can, however, embrace and live your higher purpose in any job, even while you may be searching for the next one.

You may also be able to develop tangible rewards even from a job you hate: contacts, learning new skills, and/or learning what you don’t want to do and being grateful for a better job when one does show up.

Think a moment about what your higher purpose is. Whatever it is, it has to give you enough perspective that you don’t

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worry about whatever the bozos are doing on a daily basis, because you know in your heart that you’re doing what you came to earth to do and that what you do on a daily basis
matters
.

Finding your higher purpose

Perhaps you don’t know what your higher purpose is right now. Well, for today, just do what’s in front of you. If like Michelangelo you’re mixing paints, do it with zeal; if like Bill you’re delivering pizza, do it with style. You never know where such focus might lead you—perhaps to a prestigious art commission or to a top position in a major hotel chain. One way to decide what your purpose might be is to imagine a deathbed scene: Yours. No, it doesn’t have to be a macabre one; you may—since you’re writing this scene—imagine one full of peace with your family and friends all around you. What memories are you all laughing (or crying) about?