Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy (19 page)

Slackers can be pretty intimidating to most leaders. A lot of managers simply don’t want to deal with them. They will duck down a side hallway just to avoid engagement. Managers avoid slackers for many reasons. Some may lack the skills to manage performance effectively. Performance management is difficult and requires a manager to make certain that he or she knows what behavior constitutes acceptable performance.

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Many managers really do not know what the criteria should be, beyond counting “face time” in the office.

Other managers may be paranoid about confronting an employer who is different from them in some way: a different gender, race, or generation. Finally, many managers don’t want to make anyone feel bad, or they lack confrontation skills. Can slackers be fired for goofing off at work? Ask the hapless New York City clerk fired by Mayor Michael Bloomberg for being discovered playing a game of solitaire when Bloomberg and a group of reporters trooped into the clerk’s office on a tour. Bloomberg canned him on the spot, which is legal if employees have been warned that such behavior isn’t allowed. (After all, you are supposed to work at work.)

What to do about slackers? Document, document, document. If the lazy bum is a coworker, make sure your boss knows that you’re doing your part. If your boss is the culprit, e-mail memos to him or her confirming all conversations so that you can make it clear to anyone who investigates down the road that you’ve done your part.

road ragers—preventing spontaneous combustion

on your team

Do you have team members who are constantly angry? Anything sets them off: the copier isn’t working, someone forgot to make coffee, their e-mail disappeared into cyberspace, they don’t like the way you breathe. Whatever it is, they fuss, fume, and scream at routine, daily annoyances that the rest of us grin and bear. Why do they do that?

When people are angry about everything, the critical common denominator is
them
. They mistakenly think anger is empowering and rage is a way of being assertive. Nothing

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10.
  How to Navigate Road Ragers, Slackers, and Whiners could be further from the truth. When someone is constantly irritated, they’re assuming the “poor me” victim role, which is the weakest posture one can take. In most instances, anger is nothing more than an outward manifestation of a very different underlying emotion. A colleague who regularly exhibits anger is probably scared, hurt, frustrated, or a combination of the three. Anger may also be a mask for depression. Often, those suffering from depression don’t simply withdraw; they may also strike out against others in frustration. If this is the case, it helps to understand and treat this colleague with compassion. This doesn’t mean, however, that you should take abuse. Abuse should never be tolerated in the workplace—or anywhere else for that matter. Walk away; complain to your boss or HR; and document, document, document. Just be sure that you document
behavior
—specifically what they say or do—not your conclusions, assumptions, or biases about the person’s behavior.

As you learned in Chapter 4, there is also a subtle thing that can happen in groups called emotional contagion. Because we’re social animals, we have evolved in a way that makes our brains resonate with others. When this happens, we are affected by the mood that’s occurring in the brains of those with whom we interact. This brain contagion actually helps us, in that we’re then able to “read” the moods of others and, perhaps, respond more appropriately based upon those moods. If someone is angry, for example, we may choose to keep our distance. If someone is sad or anxious, our natural tilt toward compassion might kick in, and we might be moved to comfort or help them in some way.

What’s startling about the latest research is that when our brains connect at this moment, we are not only moved to try to help or avoid the other person, but our own brains are literally changed in response.

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 Pissing Me Off!

This recent science underscores what we all know instinctively. If the boss walks into a meeting fussing and fuming, everyone else’s mental health and mood may be affected. Conversely, if one of your gloomy peers walks into a meeting unhappy, the power of the group may buoy this person. The group brain can overpower the individual temper, while the boss’s power may cancel out your individual moods.

dealing with ragers

So there are very practical reasons for limiting your exposure to others’ toxic brains. And, of course, if you can’t limit your exposure, you need to file a complaint, or even change jobs if the abuse persists and cannot be stopped. This is especially true if the person exhibits any of the warning signs of violence, as discussed in Chapter 3. If he or she does, you need to complain immediately. One way of confronting a person who is habitually angry is to say something like this:

“You did _________.”
(Describe specifically what the person said or did.)

“When I objected to your behavior, you ignored me.”
(Or yelled, etc.; describe what the person did.)

“I care about you and support you and I wish you success in
our workplace, but if we’re going to work together you need
to treat me and the other members of our team with respect.”

(Set a boundary with the abuser.)

“You hurt me (or them) when you said or did _________. It also
resulted in us missing a key deadline because Mary was so

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  How to Navigate Road Ragers, Slackers, and Whiners
upset by your outburst that she had to go home and thus the
assignment wasn’t completed.”
(Describe the behavior and the result of that behavior upon yourself, your colleagues, and the work itself.)

“I would hope this is something you’re not proud of. If you
want to continue to stomp around with a frown on your face,
go ahead, but you’re going to do it without
us
.”
(Outline consequences of repeating the behavior.)

“I respect your work and I want to have a good working rela-
tionship with you, but peace at any price is no peace at all.
You owe me and the team an apology. I intend to give you
the benefit of the doubt and move past this, but we’ve had our
last heated argument and I’ve taken my last bit of abuse from
you.”
(Add a specific request and repeat that you will not tolerate the behavior.)

The most important thing to remember is that this conversation takes place in person—not via e-mail. Talk with the individual directly and privately, listen to his or her response (and ideally, an apology) and then you can confirm what you both said with an e-mail. This is a good way to document behavior, as well as your attempts to communicate about a person’s behavior, in case you need to escalate your complaints to a manager, HR, or an attorney. Before you take any of this action, however, take the advice of St. Francis and seek first to understand. If we understand why people do what they do, it helps us to make sense of their behavior, have more compassion for it, and slow down our own reactivity. If we’re grounded in our thinking brain, we are better able to be effective with someone who is highly emotional and out of control than we would be if we just followed their lead and spewed all over the place at them.

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zookeeping the animals in your workplace

With all these different kinds of problem children, you might try the techniques wild-animal trainers employ with such great success! Writer Amy Sutherland spent a year studying with animal trainers. She then wrote a
New York Times
article titled “Kicked, Bitten and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the World Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers,” explaining how she tried the magic techniques on her husband.

What’s the secret? The technique is brilliant in its simplicity, although difficult in the discipline required to execute it. You reward the behavior you like and ignore the behavior you don’t like. Ms. Sutherland—like most of us with our significant others—had been using the exact opposite technique: Nagging. Once she switched to appreciating her husband for doing things she liked, and ignoring what she loathed, his behavior changed. Sutherland explains:

“After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

“Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw a dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I’d kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.”

Sutherland used what wild-animal trainers call “approximations,” rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. Animals don’t learn to balance balls in one session, just as she found that husbands don’t pick up dirty socks with one reminder.

She also started studying her husband as one would an exotic animal. What are its habits? Diet? Likes? Dislikes? Does

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10.
  How to Navigate Road Ragers, Slackers, and Whiners it sleep in trees or under benches? You might try the same with a coworker who annoys you. Knowledge is power and the better to train with. Once you have this information, you can begin to appreciate and reward any movement toward behavior that you want. Say, for example, that you want the slacker in your group to start doing something—anything!—that looks like working instead of surfing porn sites all day. If he picks up a report and starts to read, you would congratulate him on working. If he turns in one project—even if three more remain outstanding—you would applaud and offer him M&M’s. You get the idea. Acknowledge any movement toward success, no matter how small, and ignore the rest.

Though they may be effective, applying wild-animal training techniques to the creatures in your particular workplace zoo may challenge your endurance. In that case, see the techniques in the next chapter, which explains how to rearrange your own stress level. If all else fails, consider a nap. your

relationship toolbox

How to Move froM PiSSed off to Powerful

PiSSed off

Powerful

Blowing up at the know-it-al s

Assigning appropriate work to

know-it-al s

Believing know-it-al s act the

Understanding that they act the way

way they do to be annoying

they do to control their own anxiety

Ignoring slackers

Rewarding work and managing poor

performance

Taking abuse

Skil ful y confronting ragers

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11.

CHiLL OuT

How to cope when you want to slap someone.

Betsy Buster roars into work at 7:15 a.m. and starts firing e-mails, voice mails, and verbal rants to any hapless underlings unlucky enough to be within shouting distance. Report reading consumes her nights and weekends, and of course, e-mail never sleeps, nor does she. Breakfast is an Egg McMuffin with cheese that Betsy gobbles while navigating her commute with the aggression of a NASCAR pro. She works through lunch and dines on whatever stale pastries are available in the company kitchen. The last time she took a mental health day was 1994, when she spiked a temperature of 104° and her eyes swelled shut from an infection. Cranky? That’s her middle name.
americans work too Much

Americans work almost 200 more hours annually than we did in 1970—that’s about an extra month of work a year. According to Juliet B. Schor, a social economist at Boston College and author of
The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline

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of Leisure
, putting in long hours isn’t necessarily problematic. After all, the rewards of hard work—a fatter paycheck, bonus points with the boss, satisfaction from your accomplishments—abound. It’s only when the daily grind eclipses other areas of your life that it’s time to stop and rethink your schedule. The reality is this: Everyone you work with will piss you off if you’re stressed to the max from overwork and too little self-care.