Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy Read Online Free PDF Page A

person in your department may be a creative type who simply can’t conform to a conservative rule-bound workplace, or he or she may simply be in the wrong job. Conversely, you might be in the wrong job. If you’re in a field that requires a high level of creative energy, but you can’t tolerate eccentricity, you may be in the wrong work environment. For example, one of my executive coaching clients, Bob, came to me about John, one of the junior partners in their high-tech consulting firm. None of Bob’s attempts to manage John’s idiosyncrasies over the last five years had worked. A software developer, no one could match John’s relentless and creative pursuit of the most elegant computer program design, but placing him in front of a new client or other employees led to frequent disaster. John eschewed socks and shirts with collars. He worked all night or not at all, turned up the speakers on his computer to play heavy metal music, and mumbled through presentations. Although frequently late with deadlines, his work was superlative. My frustrated client confessed that John was probably one of the top two or three designers in the world in his subject area.
    After coaching from me, Bob finally realized that he needed to restructure his own management style in order to best utilize John. Bob stopped expecting him to meet with clients, gave up on the firm’s strict dress code, and softened his approach to office hours. As long as John and the others were producing results, they could work when they liked. They moved John’s office to an area where his music annoyed no one.
    |  14  |
    02.   What the Hell Is Your Problem? (Maybe It’s You) I did counsel Bob that he would probably always need to closely monitor John to keep him on task. This kind of micromanaging is not worth it for every employee, but for some highly creative and brilliant people it’s essential in order to utilize their special gifts.
    Who was right here? Should Bob have had to change his own management style and expectations, or should John have
    “changed his spots” in order to conform to Bob’s more conservative and orderly style?
    As usual, no one was truly right. Every one of us has our own internal radar, some of which was set at birth; we’re genetically loaded to a certain extent to be organized or messy, punctual or distracted, sensitive to others or clueless. This doesn’t mean that we can’t change, but simply that we come into this world and our bodies (or our Batman costumes) differently. We can either let those differences drive us over the edge, or we can shrug and order another margarita. We can change the environment to accommodate someone’s gifts, or we can lose that person to a more accommodating workplace.
    why it’s so hard to change other people
    Our internal, genetic wiring is like the hardware on a computer. You can change hardware, but it’s expensive and time-consuming. This genetic wiring drives much, although not all, of our personality and behavior. Current psychological theoretical consensus is that about 50 percent of our personality and natural behavior is hardwired. The other half is like the software we’re running—it’s a combination of life experience, training and education, and perhaps, the personal growth, spiritual, or psychological work we’ve done (or been forced to do) to try to change or evolve.
    |  15  |
    stop  Pissing Me Off!
    a Match Made in who-knows-where
    One thing I’ve learned in my numerous years of consulting with conflict-ridden companies is that it’s next to impossible to change another person’s hardware, and it’s also very difficult to get another person to consider running different software. It’s no picnic changing your own either. Part of the problem we have with the “difficult” people in our lives is what psychologists call “matching.” In the early days of modern psychology, much of the psychological world was explained by the