Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy (8 page)

why connections at work Matter

What does all this brain science do to help the relationshipimpaired among us connect? For one thing, it helps us see that we’ve been wired for connection and community ever since we spent our time sitting around our communal campfires and then crawled out of the cave. Indeed, physical anthropologists tell us that we were selected for connection. Those who learned how to connect were more likely to survive in the jungle or the desert; if our ancestors banded together they were less likely to be killed by lions or tigers or bears.

If we band together, our company is more likely to outlast the competition. Our organization is more able to accommodate a rapidly changing environment if the team is connected. Global competition, issues around sustainable growth, terrorism, and even road rage may seem more abstract, but the truth remains. At a basic level, if we want to survive and if we want to ward off significant depression, we need to connect. Our sensitive brains demand it. Connecting at work really is part of our biological imperative. Because of that, connecting with

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04.
  How to Connect Even When You Don’t Want To the everyday bozos and boors is still in some ways a primal part of survival. If you remember that you are part of a species born to connect, you can find empathy and bridge differences more easily.

Most u.s. workers are disconnected

Recent polls reveal that most organizations fail at the task of keeping workers connected to either the organization or their coworkers. A Gallup poll, for example, reveals that only 26

percent of U.S. employees are fully engaged at any time. On the other end of the spectrum, 19 percent of employees are actively disengaged, meaning they intentionally act in ways that negatively impact their organizations. The annual cost to employers of this actively disengaged group exceeds $300

billion nationwide. (This does, of course, prompt one to wonder: what’s up with all those folks in the middle? “
Comfortably
numb
,” perhaps, as the Pink Floyd song goes?)

Clearly, we’re now able to document the existence of highinvolvement, high-wage, high-profit companies in almost every industry—for example, Southwest Airlines; Nucor Corporation; W.L. Gore & Associates; Xilinx, Inc.; Harley-Davidson, Inc.; UPS; Costco Wholesale Corporation; Starbucks; and Alcoa, Inc., to cite just a few. These productive and growing companies also have lower labor costs overall than do their low-wage competitors. How? They ensure that workers participate in decision-making, reward employees fairly for their efforts, and provide them with good training and career opportunities. Their employees reciprocate the favor in terms of much higher productivity than that of workers in comparable low-wage companies. Starbucks executives, for example, explain that they’re able to offer unusually high benefits to their employees not because

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stop
 Pissing Me Off!

they charge a premium for their product, but because their productive, customer-sensitive employees allow the company to realize a premium for the products and services they offer. My client Southwest Airlines, for example, walks this talk. I had a highly personal experience of just how committed their founder and former C.E.O., Herb Kelleher, is to employee engagement when I spoke to 200 of the company’s top executives. My client contact introduced me to Herb, who complimented me on the presentation and was scheduled to have lunch with me. Herb and I started to walk across the meeting room to the buffet table together. Actually, I should say I walked; Herb gabbed. He stopped to talk to every single person along the way—and not just a quick hello, but long discussions of each person’s recent birthday, new grandchild, divorce, or whatever was going on in each employee’s life. After that, I never doubted that most of his employees would walk through fire for him.

how to connect

Even if your organization fails to join the employee engagement bandwagon, you can launch your own connection campaign. Connecting with people makes it easier to affect their behavior. Connecting with people before things blow up makes the inevitable conflicts easier to resolve. So, there’s clearly a self-serving reason to connect with boors and bozos. It really is worth the trouble! With a few pointers, even the relationshipimpaired can connect. I’ll offer many more ideas throughout this book, but here are a few to get you started:

1. Start connections early and often
: Invite newcomers for coffee, lunch, or a walk. If your new colleague is of

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04.
  How to Connect Even When You Don’t Want To the opposite gender, invite a few people so that your

noble intentions are abundantly clear. Getting to know people at a personal level before they start to annoy

you always helps.

2. Learn to listen well.
In our ADD age, just having someone’s full attention is a gift. Even five minutes of undivided attention from someone can lead to more positive interactions. Don’t multitask!

3. Cultivate compassion
. If we try to empathize with what the other person is feeling, we help create connection. Try to remember a time in your own life when you had

similar feelings or thoughts. As psychiatrist Daniel Stern explains, our nervous systems “are constructed

to be captured by the nervous systems of others, so that we can experience others as if from within their

skin.”

4. relate those similar feelings and thoughts
. This helps the other person resonate with your brain. This defines rapport. Rapport includes mutual attention, shared positive feelings, and physical mirroring.

5. Celebrate.
This helps set up the shared positive feelings part of rapport. Take it upon yourself to create small celebrations for completing a sale or a new project and for marking milestones such as a new baby, engagement, or birthday. Bonding during happy times helps us through the sad times.

6. Understand unwritten rules
. Every family, work group, and society has them. There are secrets that we don’t

tell grandmother, for example, or generic-looking coffee cups that, in fact, belong to the boss. Some people understand these rules and ferret them out instinctively, but just knowing they exist can help. Ask someone for

help in decoding the unwritten rules when you’re new

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 Pissing Me Off!

to an organization. Similarly, you might consider giving a new coworker a discreet “heads-up” if you anticipate he or she may commit a faux pas.
7. Learn to read others accurately
. Many of us know how to do this instinctively. This includes the art of reading others’ nonverbal cues. For example, if you’ve ever tried to talk to someone who thought that standing with his

back to you while talking was appropriate, you know

what I mean. If you aren’t naturally good at reading between the lines, take heart. You’re not alone. There’s actually a name for the inability to read social cues. It’s called dyssemia, and there are books and programs that can help. (See Paul Ekman, Micro Expression Training Tool [METT] in Appendix A of this book.)

8. Learn the art of presentation and persuasion
. It’s one thing to understand how someone feels; it’s another to act appropriately on that knowledge. It can be done,

however. Books and seminars abound on this subject.

Take advantage of the information age.

9. repeat often: We’re all doing the best we can
. There are no perfect workers, mates, parents, or children. We’re all, to a greater or lesser extent, the victim of our history, our brain chemistry, our unhealed wounds, and our childhood. Despite this, the majority of people are trying to connect, to be kind, to do the right thing. We’re not always perfect, and we’re not always kind, but we need to acknowledge our shortcomings when

we can. As pioneering behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner taught us, what is reinforced gets repeated. Anytime someone demonstrates a kind, connecting

act toward you, express your appreciation in words and deeds. This acknowledgment reinforces the act and makes it more likely to recur. Do your part.

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04.
  How to Connect Even When You Don’t Want To
eMpty your eMotional trash

Author Laurel Mellon argues that before people can even form a connection, each has to clear out “emotional trash,” old issues that interfere with the ability to have a clear connection with another person. As the pioneering psychologist Carl Rogers explained, “The curious paradox is that when I can accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

How do you do this? One way is to more often notice what we’re feeling, be honest with ourselves, and allow feelings to run their course. Psychologist Gay Hendricks offers this explanation from his book
Conscious Living: Finding Joy in
the Real World
:

“Accepting yourself begins with fundamentals such as letting yourself feel your emotions to completion. What does this mean? If you begin feeling sad, for example, when you are watching a movie, it’s likely that the movie is touching an issue of your own. Instead of rushing out of the movie back into your busy life, let yourself feel the emotions that were stirred into motion by the scene in the film. The paradox of awareness is that if you give yourself full permission to feel your emotions, you don’t find yourself stuck in the unsettling grip of them.”

For most of us, everyday workplace interactions bring up lots of emotions, which may remind us of old unhealed memories or hurts. While it’s painful and unsettling, we need to feel those emotions deeply in order to connect more deeply with our coworkers as well as ourselves and others in our lives. This is neither an easy task, nor one for the faint of heart. But, as Desmond Tutu points out, there’s nothing else that can save our troubled world.

You may be whining at this point that all this connecting is a lot of hard work. Gaining an attitude adjustment is the

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stop
 Pissing Me Off!

first step. Once you’ve mastered your own reasons and motivations for understanding the liars and tyrants and boors among us, you’re better able to cope with the effort that requires. As you’ll learn in Chapter 5, understanding
why
people do what they do can give us the will and the reason to connect. your

relationship toolbox

How to Move froM PiSSed off to Powerful

PiSSed off

Powerful

Believing that you can ignore

Understanding that connecting with

coworkers

others is a biological imperative

Ignoring difficult people without Understanding that difficult coworkers even trying to connect

will be easier if we create connections

Assuming connecting is difficult Taking small steps to connect with new people

Assuming lack of connection is

Recognizing that our inability to connect

the other person’s fault

may be the result of our own “emotional

trash”

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05.

ArE THEY DOiNG iT JuST TO PiSS

YOu Off?

How to understand how people are hardwired.

Jerry McGruder is going nuts. The young twentysomethings he has hired show up for work with tiny earbuds pumping music or cell phone conversations into their ears—and they wear collarless shirts and tennis shoes to the office. More often than not they look like they’ve hopped out of bed, thrown on a pair of jeans, and forgotten to comb their hair! Jerry sighs when he looks at them.

When he tries to shake hands, they seem unsure of what the custom is. However, they bombard him with a relentless flurry of e-mail, text, and instant messages—even when sitting in a cubicle less than twenty feet from Jerry’s door! “Why can’t they walk in and talk to me?” Jerry fumes. “Don’t they know how to carry on a professional conversation?”

When he mentions his favorite TV show, they look at him blankly. “And what is the X in the Xbox?” he asks. Work never used to anger him this much, he confides to his wife at dinner in the evening.