How to get along with difficult co-workers

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People with good social skills can get along with almost anyone, and if you want to be successful in your career, you have to make people like you: Figure out what matters to them, what makes them tick, and then speak to that when you interact.

The key to being likeable is to be able to adapt yourself to different situations. This does not mean that you have to be someone you’re not. Each of us is complicated, adaptable and curious. You need to know yourself well enough to understand a broad range of facets of yourself so that you can call up the right one with the right crowd.

The field of psychology that focuses on this particular issue is social psychology. And, fortunately, we have massive amounts of data from clinical research to tell us how thoughts, feelings, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others: Use this research to train yourself to be someone everyone wants to work with.

Think hard about how you approach a group. Do you hope that the group conforms to you or do you conform to the group? As long as you respect the people in the group, conforming to them enough to form a bond is not a bad idea. No one can be with their soul mate 100% of the day. But you can find pieces of yourself that match up with just about everyone, if you are in-tune with yourself and other people.

Social psychologists call people who analyze social situations and try to match their public self to the situation “high self-monitors”. Self-monitors are very good at gauging what their audience expects in each given situation. And these people are very sensitive to impression management techniques — they watch other people use them and then use the techniques themselves.

For some people, this skill of monitoring themselves within a group comes naturally — they are chameleons who can mirror other peoples' moods. Chameleons know what to say when their boss's pet gerbil dies and they know what to say when a co-worker suggests a date.

Other people are low self-monitors. These people attempt to alter a situation to match their private self. These people have one way of conducting themselves and have no idea how to change for a given situation. These are the people who make inappropriate jokes at a client meeting or are too stiff and formal at a company picnic. Chameleons generally disgust these low self-monitors, but I've got news for you: chameleons don't lose opportunities for being difficult to work with.

If you can get along with different groups of people, you won’t just be liked more at work, you’ll be more equipped to meet your personal goals. People who are able to develop friendships with a wide range of people are more able to change the way they think about themselves, according to Tracy McLaughlin-Volpe, professor of psychology at University of Vermont. Developing cross-group friendships as opposed to in-group friendships makes your more adept at creating a dynamic image of yourself — you are likely to be a person who can make changes to become the person you want to be.

You want to be someone who can make changes in yourself when you see the need, because social psychologists have also found that people remember negative traits more than positive traits. So if you tell a new employee your boss is “smart, open-minded, kind and disorganized,” the new employee will form an opinion of the boss primarily on “disorganized.” Your bad traits have more sticking power on your reputation than your good traits. If you want to be liked, face up to your weaknesses and compensate for them.

Most people who hate office social dynamics think people have to change who they are to succeed. But good social skills at work are really a reflection of empathy for the people around you. Anyone who is being their best self — kind, considerate, expressive, interested in others — will instinctively do the right thing at the office.

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Take your pet to work day

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Today is take your pet to work day. In New York City, pet owners are carrying around doctor’s notes that say their dog is a medical necessity — as in the psychological benefits of dogs — so that store owners legally have to let the dogs come in. I can see that doing this at the workplace will be next.

I don’t recommend it. Why be annoying about your dog when there are so many other things to be annoying about at work? Maybe a better idea is to be annoying to get on a great project or to work from home? And if you really want to bring your dog to work, check out JobKite’s new listing of pet-friendly offices.

I have actually worked at a few offices with dogs. It wasn’t bad, but make sure your dog is cubicle-ready. People always think their dogs are better behaved than they really are.

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Big news for Episcopal Church, and we all benefit when one industry shines

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Overheard at synagogue: “I would like to grow up and become a rabbi like you, but my dad doesn’t think women should be rabbis.” From the head rabbi’s seven-year-old daughter to the assistant rabbi who is a woman.

Religious groups seem to be one of the last standouts — along with coal mining and construction — where people feel free to openly declare that women should not hold top jobs. Don’t get me wrong, people in other fields are thinking it. But they know to talk in low voices.

Yesterday, the AP reports, “Jefferts Schori, bishop of Nevada, was elected Sunday as the first female presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the US arm of the Anglican Communion.” She has an advantage over other women rising in religious organizations in that she has worked as a pilot and an oceanographer, other fields that are male dominated. Sharing ideas across industry lines is critical toward diversifying leadership in any given industry. In this sense, Schori is a one-woman meeting-of-the-minds.

But Schori is unique in that more than other fields of business I know, women in the pulpit have separated themselves from women who are breaking down gender barriers in other professions. While women in engineering, for example, align themselves with women in marketing and mentor each other, women in the pulpit are less likely to see themselves in the same boat as these other women.

But they are in the same boat: Religious organizations have office politics and salary issues; there are issues over who gets their own secretary and there are issues with sixty-year-old men who think they’re still working in an era where it was legal to specify gender in a help wanted ad.

The good news is that there are “more liberal attitudes toward women in leadership positions among those in younger generations,” and the gender divide is decreasing quickly among younger workers. Example: A female rabbi I know was interviewing for a job in a large synagogue. A male congregant stood up and asked, “How can you do such a demanding job as this one and take care of your kids?” A younger male congregant stood up and said, “That’s an illegal question. Don’t answer it.”

No matter what your business situation is, you should keep an ear to the ground about how people in other industries are changing the rules of management and success. There is a large and inclusive base of people who want a flexible and tolerant workplace. Align yourself with those people. You don’t have to do this alone, even as a priest or a rabbi.

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Howard Stern’s lesson in customer loyalty

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Howard Stern has lost most of his audience. I’m not a big fan of his. I like public discussion of sex that is more interesting and productive than Howard offers. But I’m not above learning from him, and how can you not learn a lesson or two from a guy who has lost almost 11 million of his12 million listeners in just a few months?

Stern bet that his audience was so loyal that they would pay $13 a month to listen to him on satellite. Inside Radio reports today that most of Stern’s listeners are just plain too lazy to make the switch. (Though 13% don’t want to pay the extra fee.) The findings of this survey are consistent with the conventional wisdom that 80% of lost customers were not actually unhappy with what they were getting.

Each of us takes little gambles with our customer base all the time. Yesterday, for example, I told someone that I was changing our project specifications a little bit. I moved away from her vision and closer to my own. I made a bet that she likes working with me enough to put up with my change.

In this vein, an editor once told me, when I turned in a column late two weeks in a row, “People who write as well as you can be late. You just need to keep writing well.” That worked for a while, but then I really pushed his limits and he fired me. In this sense, I have empathy for Howard that he overestimated loyalty. Today I make more conservative estimates, and I bet Howard would do the same, if he could.

Once we all admit that we are all marketers, then we’re more humble about loyalty. Then we’re more careful to really get to know your clients and what matters to them — be they radio listeners, editors, consumer purchasers, or the guy in the cubicle next to you.

Howard Stern overestimated how dependent his listeners were on him, but perhaps he underestimated how beholden individual radio stations were to him. The trick, as a marketer, is to find out whose business is most dependent on you, and who you are most dependent on. Then you know where you have room to wiggle.

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Improve your career by moving the candy dish

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Here’s news in the category of good-looking people have better careers:

Now you can blame your co-worker for your tanking career and science will support you: A candy dish at work can make you fat. But a candy dish that is more than 6 1/2 feet away from you will be less tempting. Measure your co-worker’s dish. If it’s too close, move it every morning before she gets in. She’ll never notice.

Maybe there is actually some justice to the fact that thin people make more money than fat people: A study at Tufts University found that when rats ate foods higher in fat and sugar their minds were not as sharp as the minds of rats on a lean diet. (Reported by Self Dishes, which, if the editors are reading, should have more articles and fewer recipes)

Of course, there are some people who are never going to be in the good-looking category. And I am a big fan of self-knowledge, so I applaud anyone who can admit this. (Note of personal limitation: I could never admit this, and I would kill any worker who kept candy by my desk.) Here is some useful advice from Marty Nemko about how to improve your earning power even if you are ugly: Career Advice for the Unattractive.

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Even on steroids, you have to be nice

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Barry Bonds, the recently crowned home run king (and the less recently crowned king of steroids) was incredibly rude to the press for most of his career, and he is suffering for that now because the crowds are booing and the press is writing only parenthetically about his record-breaking performance.

You know the lesson here: You have to treat everyone you meet with respect because you don’t know who you are going to need later. The problem is that people use the lesson at work — they treat their boss and their underlings well. But they don't treat people they don’t work with well.

This is such a ubiquitous problem that half of American workers have been psychologically abused at their workplace, according the Handbook on Workplace Violence, a government publication. But the abuse is coming from people outside the workspace, such as clients, customers or, as in Barry’s case, third-party people you just have to deal with in order to get your work done.

Big-time journalist Patricia Sellers, in a lecture at Yale University, said, “The best thing, the smartest thing I’ve done is to be nice to assistants and secretaries. I believe you should be nice to everybody. As you rise, you will see the world gets so small.”

She describes, in fact, what happens to a guy like Bonds. When you are on top of the world, you stand on the part of the mountain that is very small. The number of people you really talk to at the top is small. It’s more intense than at the bottom, where there’s room for tons of people.

Extremely talented people can get to the top while being a jerk, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be celebrated. After all, the baseball writers are also the Hall of Fame voters.

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Good negotiating skills decrease stress

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If you want to know the inside dirt on being a top-flight waiter, Waiter Rant is the blog to read. Yesterday he wrote about the stress of the Memorial Day crowd. I am always shocked by the insane and totally out of line antics this guy has to put up with, which is why his blog is so popular.

Some of the most stressful jobs are the ones where you have to negotiate among difficult personalities. You could be launching a rocket to the moon, but if everyone is getting along and working very well together, it’s might be less stressful, in the moment, than managing a room full of screaming airplane passengers who have been told their plane won’t take off that day.

My best negotiating lessons came in couples therapy, when my husband wouldn’t get his bike out of the apartment (we live in New York, in a tiny space). The couples therapist did not, as I was hoping, tell my husband to shut up and put his bike in storage. The therapist had us read Getting to Yes and then negotiate a solution we could both live with. (For those of you who doubt my negotiating skills, the bike is gone, but believe me, it was a lot of hard work, and I recommend that book.)

The most important part of negotiations is understanding the other person’s motivations. You could learn this by being a waiter, or any of a long list of service workers whose job is to read people in order to make them happy. (My friend is a hairdresser-to-the-very-rich and has the same types of stories as the waiter.)

But it takes a lot of years of being a waiter or a hairdresser to be great at reading people. You might do better checking out Speed Reading People by Paul Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger. These are people who have mastered the art of bringing the personality test to the masses. And in this book you learn how to apply the Meyers-Briggs principles to people you meet so you know how to communicate with them.

A lot of your workplace stress could be alleviated if you were better at negotiating — asking for less work, better projects, getting co-workers to stop annoying you, convincing your boss to listen — these are all negotiation points. So when you are feeling stressed, think about how to solve the problem through negotiation. And meanwhile be thankful you don’t deal with the customers on Waiter Rant.

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Great book; unprintable title

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The book I’m reading right now is by twenty-five-year-old Ryan Heath: “Please Just F* Off, It’s Our Turn Now: Holding Baby Boomers to Account.” The book is great and offers incredible insight into what young people have to offer and why baby boomers need to get out of their way.

It’s published in Australia so you can’t buy it in the U.S. in stores. So it’ll cost you $40 to buy the book from the Australian publisher and have it shipped, but it’s worth it. In any case, I will tell you some of my favorite parts here.

The premise of the book is that baby boomers refuse to retire, refuse to admit that their ideas are outdated, and they are making their institutions irrelevant to young people, who are basically refusing to take part in baby boomer institutions. Heath focuses a lot in Australia, because young people are leaving in droves. But a lot of his points resonate in the U.S. also, where young people have little interest the all-consuming corporate life that baby boomers have institutionalized.

Heath describes his generation with great one-liners like, “We’ve been to IKEA more than we’ve been to church.” And he does a great job of describing how totally different his generation is from the baby boomers. Of young people’s energy he says, “It’s not a counter-culture or a mass protest. It’s not even a movement — it’s a view on hundreds of little movements, technologies, communications, social networks and practical philosophies.”

His ability to describe his generation is reason enough to buy the book. Young people will cheer at his ability to frame them in an extremely positive light and his ability to inspire excitement. The U.S. supports a large industry of baby boomers selling themselves as experts on generation Y to other baby boomers who want to retain gen-Y employees (who usually leave after less than two years). This book also makes you wonder about the ability of baby boomers to train other baby boomers on how to handle gen-Y employees.

Heath also does a great service when he tells boomers to change how they are dealing with young people. He warns boomers that, “We lead a much grander lifestyle than our incomes suggest, we solve problems in a flash and we’ve read about the latest dumb thing George Bush said before most of you have even turned up to the office.” He describes the power of blogging and being part of a networked community and says, “We want conversations not lectures.”

Heath shows that the impact of a networked community and a generation that refuses to receive lectures is that hierarchy is dead. “You are playing the wrong game if you thin power and influence and even fun is about being in control anymore,” warns Heath. “Hierarchies can’t cope with the new complex world we live in unless they are rigidly enforced as in the case with armed forces. But they aren’t needed for most things in our lives. Networks are designed to negate hierarchy — their members collaborate rather than compete.”

He has great insight, and he’s brave to dis the boomers when they still control almost all media outlets. Generation X might bristle at the unbridled self-confidence and optimism of Generation Y. But the Xers will be relieved to see that finally young people have the demographic force to take the boomers to task. Ryan Heath is the beginning of a tidal wave.

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Cheating with a co-worker without getting undressed

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I founded a company with a guy who was single and good looking and everyone who met with us thought we were dating. We weren’t. He was almost twenty years older than I was, for one thing. But we did spend ten hours a day together, and at some point it’s hard to say it’s only business.

It’s not uncommon to feel like you’re almost married to someone you work with. In fact, 32 percent of workers feel that way. The Des Moines Register reports that this is generally a common and positive workplace trend. I have to say that my experience of the phenomena was positive, also. We were very in tune with what each other was thinking because we were so emotionally connected. We handled meetings better as a team, and we grew the company more effectively because we were so invested in the other person as well as the company.

This sort of relationship can go bad, though, according to this month’s Oprah magazine, (which, by the way, is really underrated by the intelligentsia. I love the magazine and recommend that you subscribe. After all, what other publisher has the power of Oprah to get anyone she wants in the whole world to be in her magazine?) So anyway, according to the magazine, when these relationships go bad it’s because the people are getting their emotional needs met by a co-worker instead of their boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse. Oprah’s in-house therapist says that’s cheating, even if there’s no spit-swapping. And, she points out that if your marriage sucks, it’s a lot easier to fix it when it sucks than to fix it when it sucks and you’ve cheated.

So really, this sort of workplace spouse relationship only works well if you’re not in a relationship outside of work. It’ll work well as a stop-gap measure to keep things interesting until you can either get something going outside of work or start having sex with that co-worker. (If you’re going to do the latter, it’s tricky to not destroy yourself and/or your career. Here are four tips, along with the comforting fact that 40% of the working world has taken the same, insane risk.)

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Don’t be the hardest worker in your job or in your job hunt

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If you work the most hours you look the most desperate. You shouldn’t look lazy, but don’t be the hardest worker. After all, why do you need to work so much harder than the next person? Are you not as smart? Not as organized? Not as confident in your ability to navigate a non-work world? In many cases all three are true for those who work the hardest.

The fact that the hardest worker is not necessarily the most successful rears its head before work even starts: A study conducted by Alan Krueger, professor of economics at Princeton University, shows that when it comes to workplace success, it doesn’t matter if you get in to an Ivy League school, it matters if you apply. In this case what matters is ambition and self-image, not getting the best grades or having the best test scores.

Nonstop work offers diminishing returns after graduation as well. Marita Barth is a student at MIT in biological engineering. She is at the top of her field yet she makes time to play ice hockey and volunteer at local charities. When she talks about taking breaks from her lab, Barth says, I could not maintain focus and energy if I worked nonstop. I would completely lose perspective.”

Don’t tell yourself that you work nonstop because you love your work: If you really loved your work, you’d take a break so you don’t mess it up. People who work longer than the typical eight hours a day start to lose their effectiveness quickly. “If you work all the time, you lose your edge,” warns Diane Fassel, CEO of workplace survey firm Newmeasures and author of Working Ourselves to Death. “Often these people are perfectionists, controlling and not good team players. The hardest workers are “not the best producers in terms of efficiency and creativity.”

Ironically, moments that elevate your level of success at work often require time away from work. For example, a grand idea that impacts your company's bottom line probably won’t come to you when your brain is entrenched in workplace minutia. Anyone can work the hardest, but only special people can sit on a rock and come up with a brilliant idea. In fact, even daily troubleshooting requires some mental space. Barth has found that, “It takes a lot of thought to see what’s going wrong and make another plan. And at some point, if I spend too much time in the lab without a break, I’m not efficient.”

If you can’t stop working, you might be in for some bad news: Workaholism. Kevin Kulic, professor of psychology at Mercy College, says, “With any of those -holics, you are one if it causes you or other people a problem.”

But some people purposely create imbalance. “For many people, workaholism is about perfectionism or avoidance,” says Kulic. The hardest workers have actually lost the self-confidence to stop working. They are either terrified of making a mistake or a misstep, or they are terrified of the world that lies beyond their work — for example crumbling personal relationships.

Kulic cites the Yerkes-Dodson law that says too much or too little stimulation is bad. We need a happy medium in order to perform best. And Fassel cites worker surveys that support this law — the happiest workers have a workload that falls in between very heavy and very light.

This rule for working less applies to a job hunt, too. Many of you will be happy to hear that, “The amount of time you work beyond five hours a day has no impact on your ability to land a job” — good news brought to you by David Perry, managing partner of the recruiting firm Perry Martel International and co-author of Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters.

Perry told me that a job hunt is like training for the 50-yard dash. “Everything is aimed at getting the interview. And you need to be mentally prepared.” Just as an athlete does not over train for the race, a job hunter will also experience defeating fatigue if there’s too much energy spent on the hunt.

Perry is adamant that the best jobs do not go to the smartest person or hardest worker but to the person who best reads his or her situation. So forget being the hardest worker because you need to be “bright eyed and bushy tailed.” Get out from behind that computer each day, he says and “enjoy the rest of your life.”

 

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