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Dealing with Difficult People in the Workplace
The skill of dealing with difficult people in our workplace is a necessary tool for us all to have in our social tool box. Welcome to our website. We are glad you are here. If you or a loved one are having trouble in this area, this site is for you. We hope that we can give you support and provide you with insight for this seemingly complex problem. Having to deal with problem bosses or coworkers is very common, regardless of the education or income level of the company involved. It is a sad fact that there are just as many dysfunctional professionals as there are tradesman or entry level employees. We all have to deal with them at some point in our careers. Dealing with difficult people in the workplace can cost us years out of our financial progress, and in years creating our emotional estate as well. In dealing with difficult people, we need to understand the dynamics behind their manipulative techniques and their skills at entering into our boundaries, more about that later. Like Salmon swimming upstream to spawn, or gazelles crossing a river to migrate, we humans have to go to work. At the stream’s edges are brown bears hoping to catch a salmon, and waiting under the surface of the river are crocodiles intent on a gazelle lunch. Lurking in our workplace settings are characters just as predatory as any brown bear or crocodile. These predators are the difficult people in our work world with which we will need to deal if we are to survive. Dealing with these difficult people in the workplace is a mandatory skill we must master if we are to survive financially and emotionally. We can perceive others as being difficult to work with for two reasons, the first is they cause us unnecessary hardship in the discharge of our duties; the second is they do not give us the recognition we need for tasks we perform. Because we are humans with emotional needs, we require not one, but two forms of payment for the work that we do. The first form of payment is of course money. The other form of payment is respect and recognition for the role we play within the company and to its customers. As long as we receive the money we need and the respect we want, all is well. However, the work setting can be a haven for predatory persons. Each of us will need to acquire a small inventory of tools with which to deal with them. Not all tools will work for everyone, but one tool will work for everyone if we find the right one for us. These persons can be company owners, bosses, or coworkers with a leveraged bargaining position. They, like you seek financial and emotional satisfaction in their work setting. For them, alternatively, having a junior coworker to abuse and manipulate may be what they want in their world to prosecute their emotional agenda. In other words, they need a victim and an audience to make them feel complete. Dealing with difficult people in the workplace will mean you not being either their victim or their audience, and not playing their game. Coworkers can be difficult for two separate reasons. The first is the requirements of the job. If the tasks they must do are very specific, and require a high degree of punctuality, being difficult may be a necessary part of their and your operation. This would be the case in a high output kitchen, a production environment, or in a very competitive situation like a bidder in a car auction or stock market. In those situations, yelling and strong emphasis in all communications is necessary. All workers must be very extrovert, and at times have very thick skin to be successful in those types of work. In these fast-paced settings, giving encouraging feedback to a needful coworker is not always possible. The requirements of the job may not allow for compliments and praises at the time the worker seeks praise. A worker needing recognition in these settings must see that recognition in a subjective way. If the offending superior or coworker does not directly say ‘good job!’ in words, then we must look for it in their actions. Does the superior or coworker repeatedly seek out you to work with when they come under the gun? Do they call you in on extra days when they could as easily call in another? Do they give larger workloads to you that need attention that is more precise? If the answer to these questions is yes, then see their present treatment towards you as a compliment. Your employer or coworker is simply putting their best foot forward in utilizing you above others, because they want it done right, and they trust you more than they trust your peers. If they are using you, that means they need you. Interpret that as a good thing, even if they do not compliment you personally with words. In this day of competition in labor markets from overseas and within different worker age groups here at home, being included is itself an unspoken compliment. Be sure your job discomfort is coming from the boss or co-worker as the source, and not from you being in the wrong line of work for your personality. Your present dissatisfaction may be God calling you to a higher form of employment where you will be much happier. Over time, we all progress up the employment ladder as we age. Perhaps you are long overdue to progress into supervision or a higher line of work. Players in sports become coaches, actors become producers, truck drivers become dispatchers, and in many fields of work, employees start their own businesses. Perhaps this need to be dealing with difficult people in the workplace is a prompting from God to move up in life to a higher position. Your employer or coworker will see you through his or her own worldview. If they do not need recognition for the tasks that they do, they will not be aware that you may need personal recognition for certain things that you do. They may assume that the work setting has met your emotional needs simply because the same setting has met theirs. Having emotional needs is not a sign of weakness, and seeking recognition for your participation within a company is your right, not a luxury. The work setting has met their emotional needs, and your work setting should meet yours as well. In review, we must first consider if we are getting compliments from our employer’s actions, even if they do not openly tell us. If we have, then we move on to the next consideration. Then we must consider if we are in the line of work for our age group. Once we have answered that second question to our satisfaction, then we can move on to the issue of our unacceptable co-worker. Do you see a pattern here? We always start with the internal questions first, then we move outwards to the external questions. We have determined that our employer is giving us the recognition we need, even if it is not in the concrete form we may wish. Next, we have determined that we are in the right setting God has for us where we can be happiest. Each one of us has a proper place of happiness, prosperity, and fulfillment at every point in our lives that we are to be in so we can grow to the next place. If we still see the supervisor or coworker as being unacceptably difficult, then we must address their poisoning behavior towards us. We deserve to get our selfish nurturement needs met, and if a boss or coworker degrades us, humiliates us, and ignores our need for respect, then we need to engage them. There can only be one outcome, if the stress they are causing you is intolerable. Dealing with difficult people in the workplace means either getting them to give you the cooperation and respect you deserve, or you or them finding another place to work. You do deserve cooperation and respect, and at some point, either they or another work setting must provide that cooperation towards you, that is the bottom line. How we project our power to defend our emotional interests is much like how a country projects its power to defend its political interests. The first attempts are always diplomatic and polite. We do not start out by sending our aircraft carriers and nuclear attack submarines into their coastal waters to get respect. We talk to the offending party and explain our position in a manner consistent with our personality. We begin by engaging them as a friend, and offer to buy them refreshment in the break room or from the snack truck when it comes around at break time. Every time you see them in the hallway or in the parking lot, make it a point to speak to them by name and recognize their presence. Even among dysfunctional personalities, recognition goes a long ways. This behavior may be all the other party needs and they may back off from their overly difficult behavior towards you. This is particularly necessary for newcomers as they enter a company. If the offending co-worker is senior to you, then it is a good possibility the senior worker is waiting you to acknowledge your own newcomer status, even though you may have been there awhile. Once you have acknowledged admission as the lesser seniority employee to them, then they will feel relief and can back off from their harsh initiation posture towards you. Everyone within any social group has a natural suspicion of newcomers into that group, and the more extrovert personalities will manifest these rites of passage upon the newbies. Once the senior employees and alpha pack leaders see you acknowledge your newbie status, they are then free to be more polite and accommodating to you, as you are not contesting their authority. One of the best ways to do this is to ask them for advice on something. This lets them know you recognize them as older, stronger, and wiser in the ways of the company and its customers. Seeking their wisdom tells them you place them above you in status, which in fact raises your status within the group. Finding approval with a pack leader will establish your place within the company, since you seek entry into the group on the group’s terms. Remember, this is not about job skills or competency; it is about social ranking and getting along with others in the social environment only. Exerting your professional prowess or superior product knowledge over those senior to you will do you no good here. What the other employees want to see is how much you need them, and how much you want to be part of their group. If you do not demonstrate a need for acceptance from the alpha members within the group, they will keep you out of the loop socially and professionally. Even the most skilled worker will be outcast if they do not need to be part of the group on the group’s terms. Group integrity is what this is about, not job skills or productivity. Dealing with difficult people in the workplace may well mean just finding your pecking order within the group. In order to do that you need to relate to the senior members within the group and establish your personal relationships with them. As you do that, your ranking with the other members will follow. Most of the time dealing with difficult people in the workplace simply means establishing you place in the workgroup hierarchy with your seniors. If you have found acceptance from the group at large, and the problem is sibling conflict, we will address that in detail in its own page here. In these matters of peer-to-peer relationships, we talk about them in detail in the link below in Coping with workplace stress. In the links below, we will also talk about depression and anxiety for police, and we will add specific titles as time progresses. There are many specific situations, each deserving of attention on its own. We wish to talk about all of them as time goes by, in the case one or more touches your world. These include coping with a new job, coping with difficult bosses who bully, dealing with an addicted person, dealing with cynical people, dealing with rude people office, and dealing with a transition workplace, among others. God bless you as you begin your new life today. We would love to hear from you. Please tell us how you are doing in your search for answers, and to share your trials and victories with us! We answer every Email personally. For more on this subject please consider our first in series book Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind. In it, we take you through your spiritual journey back home to your Original Self. We talk about God's purpose behind that soul’s journey, as we follow our heart’s dreams to our ultimate destiny. We answer many questions about selfishness, prosperity, psychotherapy, and finding our dreams and happiness. We share much about boundaries. We also talk about the spiritual controls we have within to bring our good to us. Those controls are our Sincerity Switch, Spontaneity Switch, and lastly our Feelings and Dreams Switch. This is the ultimate book on your type of situation. Thank you for visiting! Shayne and Lori North
Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind The Book
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