Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy (7 page)

n Threatening and Disturbing Behavior

• Direct and indirect threats

• Mood swings, depression, bizarre statements, delusions of
persecution

n History of Violence

• Domestic violence, verbal abuse, antisocial activities
n Romantic Obsession

• Physical or romantic obsession

n Substance Abuse

• Trouble with alcohol or drug addiction

n Depressive Behavior

• Self-destructive behavior

• Loner behavior or isolating themselves from others

• Unkempt physical appearance, despair, sluggish

decision-making

n Pathological Blamer

• Accepts no responsibility for his or her actions

• Constantly blames coworkers, employer, the system
n Impaired Ability to Function

• Poor impulse control

n Obsession with Weapons

• Ownership of gun or gun collection, combined with antiso-
cial behavior

• Fascination with shooting skills or weapon-related activity
n Personality Disorder

• Antisocial or borderline personality disorders

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03.
  Your Workers’ Bill of Rights

• Irritable, aggressive, involved in disputes or fights with others

• May steal or destroy property with little remorse

• Borderline personality shows moodiness, instability, impul-
sive action, easily agitated

More detail on the legal problems discussed in this chapter is beyond the scope of this book, although many valuable resources are listed in the appendices. Note, also, that some of these laws only apply if your organization has a certain number of employees. The number varies by the particular law but could be from fifteen to fifty. What’s important is to recognize when someone has crossed the line from merely difficult to doing something illegal or acting in a way that is clearly a violation of your organization’s policy or values. These situations require an approach that is different from the one you would take when dealing with generic liars, tyrants, and boors. Now that you’ve had a chance to ponder
what
behavior you find difficult, you may be wondering how to connect with these rascals. I’ll solve that mystery in the next chapter.

your

relationship toolbox

How to Move froM PiSSed off to Powerful

PiSSed off

Powerful

Tolerating behavior that’s clearly Recognizing when someone’s behavior out of bounds

isn’t just difficult but il egal

Ignorance of your organization’s Understanding your rights policies and the law

Dismissing the warning signs of Knowing the warning signs of violence violence

Whining to your friends about

Complaining to your manager or HR if

truly bad behavior

you believe someone is violating the law

or policy

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04.

HOW TO CONNECT EvEN WHEN YOu

DON’T WANT TO

Get by with a little help from your friends.

In the casting call for bozo bosses, Jerry rates number one on Pam’s list. Rumor has it that Jerry is the vice president of human resources. Reality would suggest otherwise. It would seem that Jerry’s preferred role is R.A.W., otherwise known as “Retired-at-Work.” Counting the days until his retirement, Jerry avoids starting anything new that might require real work, be considered controversial, or demand attention to delicate details. He keeps all the tried-and-true approaches on track, running on autopilot as much as possible. Jerry is completely ho-hum. He’s not causing enough visible trouble to raise eyebrows, but he’s creating enough believable bureaucracy to thwart every innovative solution that Pam offers. Innovation is just too much trouble.

You probably know people like Jerry. If your coworkers are disengaged, you will experience feelings of loneliness, frustration, and anger on the job. Moreover, if you feel that you are one of the few actually doing the work, you’ll join the ranks of your disengaged and apathetic colleagues overnight. The solution to this annoying and common problem is one word: connection.

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stop
 Pissing Me Off!

For love or Money?

Most of us spend more time at work than we do with our families. People need to feel connected at their workplace—money alone is never enough to keep talented people. Connections within teams, among departments, and to trade organizations and professional associations all matter. Feeling connected lowers stress. It increases retention. If you feel tightly linked to people at work, you’re likelier to be more productive and more satisfied. On the other hand, if you feel separated, if you feel invisible, or if you just don’t click with people, you’re probably going to feel higher stress and will burn out faster than you would otherwise. What does this have to do with working with difficult people? A lot. If you connect before the difficulty—the ideal scenario—you’ll be less likely to have trouble. Also, working through difficulties and challenging relationships requires motivation. This chapter will help give you the push you need.

why you should connect with people you can’t stand

Although we can’t change people’s hardwiring, we can influence their behavior. If you doubt this, consider for a moment this mind-boggling research about particle physics found at

http:
//
www.nist.gov/public_affairs/images/NIST_CatStates_

embed.html
. The National Institute of Standards and Technology uses a clever animation to demonstrate an amazing phenomenon. It shows six separate ions, each spinning in two opposite directions at the same time, called a superposition. An animated laser beam hits one of the particles, and the superposition collapses. Then, all the particles immediately start to spin in the same direction.

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04.
  How to Connect Even When You Don’t Want To In the spooky science of entanglement, measuring only one of them sets the direction of spin for all of them!

This sort of connection between particles—in which reality is changed by measurement—has been talked about since Einstein’s day, and it has been seen experimentally in pairs of photons for decades. We may not be able to directly extrapolate between physics and people. However, many scientists assert that the spinning particles theory tells us something that many of us know instinctively: We can influence the behavior of others simply by how we behave, feel, and think in the workplace, our very “beingness.”
The workplace environment isn’t some-
thing that just happens around you; your very presence there
influences it.
When you step into a river, the very act of putting your foot in it changes the current. So, too, does your presence influence the tone of your workplace. When you become conscious of that, you realize that you can influence the way everyone spins. There’s no need for everyone to spin unconsciously in the wrong direction. By being aware, you influence the way the entire team spins.

why Bother to connect?

What’s the big upside of connecting? Well, as Edward Hallowell’s book
Connect
tells us, we literally connect or we die. Hallowell, a psychiatrist and Attention Deficit Disorder expert, managed a successful psychiatric practice outside Boston. His clients were mainly successful male corporate executives. He noticed that, over time, the problems his clients discussed changed. Previously, clients struggled with troubled marriages or out-of-control teens, but then clients began flocking to him with clinical depression. These were men who had all the trappings of success: outstanding careers with impressive

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stop
 Pissing Me Off!

titles, mansions to match, second homes, sports cars, memberships in prestigious organizations and clubs—the works. Hallowell began researching the cause of their depression. Most of Hallowell’s clients gave him some version of the following:

“I used to spend my days connecting with people, mentoring them, coaching them, and leading meetings. Now I spend my days staring at a computer screen.”

Hallowell started studying some of the research on monkeys and on babies who were in orphanages. These beings actually died if they didn’t receive enough human connection. Similarly, he found that our screen-obsessed society is heading for disaster. The human brain is wired to connect with other humans and animals. If humans don’t receive enough of those feel-good chemicals that are fueled by intimacy, they become depressed. If the void is so vast and there is so little connection, we die. We simply lose the ability and will to sustain life. We respond just like the babies and monkeys who did not receive enough attention or physical touch.

If you doubt that we’re wired for connection, check out brain-science writer Daniel Goleman’s book
Social Intelligence
. Goleman explains, “Our brain has been preset for kindness. We automatically go to the aid of a child who is screaming in terror; we automatically want to hug a smiling baby. Such emotional impulses are “prepotent;” they elicit reactions in us that are unpremeditated and instantaneous. That this flow from empathy to action occurs with such rapid automaticity hints at circuitry dedicated to this very sequence. To feel distress stirs an urge to help. When we hear an anguished scream, it activates the same parts of our brain that experience such anguish, as well as the premotor cortex, a sign that we are preparing to act. Similarly, hearing someone tell an unhappy story in doleful tones activates our motor cortex—which guides movements—as well as the amygdala and related circuits for

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04.
  How to Connect Even When You Don’t Want To sadness. This shared state then signals the motor area of the brain, where we prepare our response, for the relevant action. Our initial perception prepares us for action: to see readies us to do.”

None other than Charles Darwin anticipated this hardwiring. He postulated that empathy was a survival mechanism. Those who connected well with others were more likely to survive because they had the help and support of the tribe. We are literally the ancestors of good connectors.

“For instance,” Goleman continues, “when we see someone expressing fear—even if only in the way they move or hold their body—our own brain activates the circuitry for fear. Along with this instantaneous contagion, the brain areas that prepare for fearful actions also activate, and so on with each emotion—anger, joy, sadness. Emotional contagion then does more than merely spread feelings—it automatically prepares the brain for appropriate action.”

Ironically, our strongest sympathetic reaction is to fear. Again, think back to the tribe. If one person saw someone expressing fear in the tribe, it was enough to set the entire tribe running to escape the terrible tiger that was sure to follow. This “emotional contagion” had both a survival and biological imperative. As Goleman explains, “If the human brain contains a system designed to attune us to someone else’s distress and prepare us to act to help, then why don’t we always help? The possible answers are manifold, enumerated by countless experiments in social psychology. But, the simplest answer may be that modern life militates against it: We largely relate to those in need at a distance. That separation means we experience

“cognitive” empathy rather than the immediacy of direct emotional contagion. Or worse, we have mere sympathy, where we feel sorry for the person but do not taste their distress in

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stop
 Pissing Me Off!

the least. This more removed relationship weakens the innate impulse to help.”

As neuroscientist Stephanie Preston and biologist Frans de Waal note, “in today’s era of e-mail, commuting, frequent moves, and bedroom communities, the scales are increasingly tipped against the automatic and accurate perception of others’ emotional state, without which empathy is impossible.”

We experience others at a distance, what I call “secondhand lives.” What we see on the TV screen may seem more real to us than our sick neighbor down the block or a colleague who needs our help.