What do you do when you find someone in your workplace difficult? Ignore them, undermine them, placate them? How can you get disparate personality types to work together productively?
Most of us have found certain people difficult to work with from time to time, and just being the boss doesn’t make managing these people any easier, so what can you to keep work productive and less frustrating all around?
- First seek to understand. What do you know about this person? What motivates them? Where are their strengths? In what areas are they an asset to the team or business? In areas you find them difficult, what about your own preferences may be conflicting with theirs?
How could you adjust your way of communicating and working with this individual to make them feel more comfortable and motivated?
- Develop common goals and teamwork. It’s harder to have conflict when you are united with others around a common goal. But big goals that are a year away or depend on so many other factors are not very motivating or unifying. Under the “big” goals, a team needs frequent, small measurable goals that they can share. Do you have a goal for how many calls to make? Response time? Meetings completing their agenda on time? Anything that is frequent, measurable and requires the team to get it done will work. Make sure there are some rewards and recognition associated, even as small as a “Well Done” sign where everyone can see, or lunch for the team at the end of the month. It doesn’t have to cost a lot to be effective.
- Clarify expectations. I know, you are always very clear. But, really, are you? Is the message you are transmitting being received the way you intended? Are you being specific enough about what is needed and how it is to be delivered? Spend time not only communicating your expectations, but also hearing them played back to you so you can make sure the message was heard clearly. “Be more courteous” could mean more pleases and thank yous to one person, but mean always showing up 5 minutes early for meetings to another. Which did you want to have happen? Be specific and concrete.
- Give and receive feedback on the spot. When you see a behavior that isn’t in line with your expectations, or have a communication or meeting that goes badly, don’t let 2-3 weeks or even 2-3 days go by before you sit down and talk about it with the people involved. Take 5 minutes right then and there. Cool down if you need to, but make sure you provide feedback or gather feedback while the incident is still fresh in everyone’s mind. You may discover that you are someone else’s “difficult person” and that a few small changes will improve the environment for everyone.
- Don’t hesitate to let a bad actor go. If you’ve tried to understand motivational and personality differences, built common goals, clarified expectations and given and received on the spot feedback and someone is still behaving badly or wrecking your team dynamics, sometimes you need to just amicably part ways. There’s nothing harder on a team than watching someone else “get away with murder” with seemingly no consequences.In one client’s company I remember an employee saying “You can’t get fired from here”. Well, if that doesn’t just encourage bad behavior, I don’t know what does. Stop the bad actor or eliminate them, and morale will improve.
Workplace harmony begins at the top, and it isn’t about agreeing or hugging each other. It’s about finding ways to leverage differences rather than letting them become barriers to growth. Healthy disagreement and dialogue usually lead to better outcomes, but they need to remain goal-focused, respectful and based on data whenever possible.
In the coaching world, we talk about environmental design as a way of enhancing and facilitating change and development. What that really means is that change is easier when the environment you live and work in supports the change.
Have you ever been to a training where you learned about a new exciting tool and came back ready to kick off a new way of working, interacting or planning, only to find that enthusiasm dampened by day 2, and the training forgotten within a few weeks? This is a result of poor environmental design.
You have a new tool or skill, but you come back to the same office, same desk, same tasks, same co-workers – all of which supported the old set of habits and skills. Without support and an environment that actively and passively encourages the use of new skills, the old patterns re-emerge quickly.
So what can you do to really look at your environment and how it impacts your ability to implement change? Here are 5 ways to look around and see what is supported in your environment:
- Physical Environment. Look around and see what is in your immediate work environment. Is it neat and organized or cluttered and messy? Where do new items land? Where do “important” projects and tasks land? Do you face colleagues or a wall or window? What can you hear in your environment? When you look at your physical environment, does it encourage you to take the actions you need? Is it more conducive to collaborative work or solitary research/writing and thinking? Does it help you focus? Does it keep you abreast of what everyone in the team is doing? What is important to you and your progress, and does the physical environment support that? How could you make it more supportive of your goals?
- Social Environment. What do you get from the people in your work, home and social environment? Do they encourage you to reach your goals? Do they have compatible goals? Are they prone to sabotaging your efforts, or are they excited to see you change? If they aren’t supportive, who could you recruit to spend more time with who would be more encouraging?
- Temporal Environment. How do you structure your time during the day and over the course of a week, and how does that impact your ability to make changes and achieve your goals? Are you able to use your most productive hours on the most difficult tasks? Are you actively managing your energy levels and scheduling tasks when the right energy is there to support them?
- Intellectual Environment. What kinds of intellectual stimulation do you get from your environment? Do you have challenging people with new ideas in your environment? What kinds of reading material, news, radio and other media do you keep in your environment and how does that impact your goals? What changes might improve your motivation and ability to stay on track with new behaviors and skills?
- Measurement Environment. What is tracked and measured in your environment? How is progress noted and how often? Are the things being measured encourage you to make change? If not, what kinds of measures might make more sense? How often are they measured?
In order to effectively make a change or build new behaviors, you can make it infinitely easier by designing the right environment. Think about someone trying to start a new diet. One of the first changes is to take “forbidden” food out of the kitchen, maybe join a support group or begin the diet with a friend or spouse, to get new recipes supporting the new diet and setting up a measurement and tracking system to see daily progress and understand any setbacks.
All changes are similar in many ways. They are hard, and can only be tackled when the motivation is there, but that is rarely enough. In order to create success, you need to carefully examine your environment and create stimuli and support for changes, new behaviors and new skills.