Episode 242 Transcript:

0:00:00 Ramona Shaw: This is episode 245 and I got a juicy topic for you. We’re going to talk about how to work for people that you don’t like. Stay tuned. Here are the two questions this podcast answers. One, how do you successfully transition into your first official leadership role? And two, how do you keep climbing that leadership ladder and continuously get promoted? Although the competition and the expectations get.

0:00:28 Ramona Shaw: Bigger, this show, The Manager Track podcast.

0:00:31 Ramona Shaw: Will provide the answer. Answers. I’m your host, Ramona Shaw. I’m on a mission to create workplaces where work is seen as a source of contribution, connection and personal fulfillment.

0:00:40 Ramona Shaw: And this transition starts with developing a new generation of leaders who know how to lead.

0:00:45 Ramona Shaw: So everyone wins and grows. In this show, you’ll learn how to think, communicate and act as a confident and competent leader. You know you can be welcome to this episode of The Manager Track podcast. In this episode I want to talk about how to work with people that you don’t like. And for the vast majority of people and in fact I’ve yet to meet the exception to this. Even if we’re the most people oriented people and we love people and we’re great with them, we don’t like them all the same, there’s some people that we like more and then some people where we have a more challenging time communicating or getting them or we might actually have had some negative experiences with them that then continue to linger.

0:01:29 Ramona Shaw: It may also be that we actually truly like a person, but they have some kind of behavior, some kind of trait. This just drives us nuts or is difficult for us to receive. So let’s say someone is really short in their emails or they’re kind of moody sometimes or their emotions kind of run wild when things get stressful and we’ve realized how we’re impacted by that and it’s not fun. Those are all moments where we might even if overall we like the person in that moment, we don’t quite like working with them.

0:02:00 Ramona Shaw: So this episode is how to deal with such situations. I’m confident that if you listen to this episode, really tuning into what’s going on for you, looking for personal examples, being self reflective and open to taking on some of this ownership that you will get a whole lot out of it and it can actually change workplace relationships and dynamics that you currently have. I’m going to talk about how to work with people that we don’t like from two different angles.

0:02:30 Ramona Shaw: If we look at an iceberg, there’s a top of the iceberg that’s sort of one angle we can look at this iceberg. It’s smaller, but it’s visible. It’s also sort of shinier and easier to describe. And then there’s the bottom of the iceberg, the thing that we actually don’t see. But it’s also the thing that’s way bigger and more impactful. And there wouldn’t be a top of the iceberg if there wasn’t this bigger, invisible bottom part of the iceberg.

0:02:59 Ramona Shaw: When it comes to anything that has to do with our emotions, anything that has to do with our mindset, with our ways of thinking, with interpersonal dynamics, there is a small part that’s the top of the iceberg and a big part that’s the bottom of the iceberg. A lot of online content, a lot of books, a lot of leadership development programs address the top of the iceberg. It’s shinier, it’s easier to comprehend, it’s quick to apply, but it completely misses out that all that is surface level, all that is like the lipstick on the pig.

0:03:35 Ramona Shaw: If you do not fully understand the bottom of the iceberg, it’s not going to lead to sustainable behavioral change or organizational change. It is going to be more difficult for to implement on a consistent basis and really start to show up in a new way. When it comes to this type of growth, we have to look at both of them in order to really get you and anyone the results that they’re truly going for.

0:04:01 Ramona Shaw: So let me start off with the top of the iceberg. The top of the iceberg. When it comes to working with people that we don’t like are all the things you’ve heard a million times before. Accept that one. We don’t like everyone equally, so don’t feel bad about that. That is naturally how we’re wired. We for example, like familiarity. We build relationships over time, trust people we know or that we seem to know for a longer time because they have similar traits, similar backgrounds.

0:04:34 Ramona Shaw: It’s also that we have maybe more rapport with someone who shares a hobby, who’s into sports or into into traveling like we are. It could also be that we really appreciate someone’s competence cuz we find that really intriguing or someone’s behavior or executive presence. And we see them as role models and that elevates them and sort of the rank of how much we like them. And then there are other people that have traits that could bother us. For example, if you had someone in your life who used to always be late and as a child that really bothered you. If you’re now in a Workplace situation where someone continuously shows up a few minutes late or delivers things late, even if you’re not their manager. So it’s not a question of performance management for you, you’re just observing it. It might really bother you, even though you’re not actually impacted by them being late. It’s just something that’s like, ah, deep inside you have this dislike for the trait.

0:05:31 Ramona Shaw: So acknowledge that this is normal. That’s one. And we’re talking still top of the iceberg. The second part of top of the iceberg is to recognize that we can’t change another person so we can really only focus on our own actions. It’s about working with people that we don’t like. A lot of it is about how do we respond to that, what are things we want to sort of let go and what are things that we need to address because we need to either tell them, hey, that makes me feel uncomfortable, or I don’t appreciate that, or you might not be aware, but this impacts me in a certain way.

0:06:03 Ramona Shaw: And by acknowledging that we have to focus on our actions, we can start to be a little bit more curious, like, why are they doing what they’re doing? I wonder how they think this is useful. We can be a little bit more inquisitive, but at the end of the day, let’s figure out what we can do here. And that brings me to the third point on that top of the iceberg, which is to have an arsenal of sentences prepared that you can say when something happens that you don’t like, or you find yourself in a situation where people interrupt you while you’re talking, or someone’s mansplaining or takes credit for your ideas, or someone’s being disrespectful, or someone is sort of not acknowledging how their work delays are impacting you, or if someone doesn’t show up to meetings, how are you going to address these things?

0:06:53 Ramona Shaw: We develop strategies and tactics over time to get better. In these conversations, if someone says something rude, you could say, can you repeat that one more time? You can say, well, that’s interesting that you say that. Tell me more, what exactly do you mean by that? You can say, excuse me, if someone interrupts you, you could interrupt them back and say, hey, I am not done talking. Please let me finish my, my comment.

0:07:18 Ramona Shaw: Or you can let them finish talking and then say, hey, I was not done talking. I’m going to quickly finish what I was going to say. Appreciate it. There are different ways that you can prepare for such and I highly recommend that you do. And it starts off with thinking about the different scenarios that you find yourself in. And it’s not the same for everyone. You might be quite often in a situation where you have a boss who’s kind of intimidating and pushback, or very direct, or they make comments that sort of like throw you into a loop.

0:07:50 Ramona Shaw: What are you going to do in such situations? If you have someone who’s constantly late with their work, how are you going to address that? Prepare for those common scenarios. Now let’s get to the bottom of the iceberg. And this is really where it gets juicy and also where I want to focus on in this episode. So the bottom of the iceberg is really understanding that how you perceive someone else is purely your experience of them.

0:08:19 Ramona Shaw: And what you think they are is what they are. That is a completely made up thing in your head. As long as you hold on to this idea. This person is selfish, this person is disrespectful, this person is annoying or sloppy or lazy. And the more that you say it, the more you solidify this label on them, the harder it will be for you to get along with them. And it’s actually a lot less about them because they’re gonna go on and do whatever they want to do.

0:08:50 Ramona Shaw: They’re most likely not particularly impacted by you liking to work with them or not. It’s also a lot less about the relationship. You might still be kind of effective working with them in terms of getting what you need, engaging with them. Most of us, at certain point in our careers or lives, we develop this emotional maturity where we can handle it and we can deal with it, but the true cost of not doing that is the pain and the emotional reaction and stress that you cause for yourself and all of us. If you can think of a situation where someone bothered you, you realized how much energy and annoyance was exuded because of them, but they didn’t even know that it was all you that had to pay the price.

0:09:41 Ramona Shaw: I was recently in a situation where something got difficult interpersonally and I realized I’m making up a story of who that person is that I didn’t. That story I didn’t have a month ago. I saw this person differently a month ago. And suddenly through a few interactions, I came to this conclusion, huh? This person is something different and something less nice than I thought. And the more that I honed in on that and put that label on them and I realized how that’s exactly what I’m doing and exactly what I’m teaching teaching and what I’m trying to practice myself of not to do.

0:10:16 Ramona Shaw: It’s a really good reminder to go back to remembering. And hence, I wanted to also bring this up in this podcast episode. We’re putting on these labels and the moment we catch ourselves doing it, this is when we need to intervene and say, stop. The person that we label a certain way, lazy, disrespectful, rude, you name it, that is your perception. Their parent, their spouse, their child, their friend.

0:10:47 Ramona Shaw: That’s likely not how they describe them. They have a very different perception and experience with them. And so the experience you have is only yours. And that’s actually good news. It’s like understanding that there is a human being who has a number of different masks, infinite number of masks, in fact, that they put on over the course of their lives. And when you see them, you see them with a certain mask on, but at the same time, they could turn around, pick up the phone from their wife or their husband or partner, and that other person on the phone sees a very different mask.

0:11:23 Ramona Shaw: So who is responsible for the mask? Is it the person or is it the one that sees the mask? It is the one that sees the mask. And that’s in part the good news. But it also means that if you don’t like that mask, if you think that person is annoying, that person is disrespectful, that person is incapable of doing the job. And that’s the mask I put on now. I see everything they do with them, that mask on their face. They could actually do a pretty good job on something and I would still be like, yeah, not good enough because I put that mask on them.

0:12:00 Ramona Shaw: Transitioning from being an individual contributor, an ic, into your first leadership role is one of the biggest transitions that you’ll make in your career. Because the things that made you successful as an IC will not be the same things that will make you successful as a leader. And especially in a new role. When all eyes are on you, when you know your boss wants you to succeed and is watching closely, your peers are having an eye on you, your team members are keen to figure out how to work with you and whether or not they can trust you during this time. By the way, whether or not you’re a first time manager or you’ve led teams in the past, but you’re in a new role as a new manager.

0:12:41 Ramona Shaw: To the team or even to the.

0:12:43 Ramona Shaw: Business, this is a time in which you don’t want to wing it. Go into such a situation with a plan and with specific tools that will help you. You Build trust and gain the respect of your co workers. In our new Manager toolkit, we’ll give you guides, tools, checklists and lots of things that are important for any new manager to keep in mind. Head on over to arcova.org free-toolkits to grab your copy. You can also find that link in the show notes or the captions.

0:13:12 Ramona Shaw: I’ll see you over there.

0:13:14 Ramona Shaw: And if that mask is not something that serves me, not something that makes me have a better experience with them, it’s not going to help me do better work, it’s not going to help me be more emotionally regulated and able to focus. If that mask isn’t helping me, then it’s controlling me. And this is the moment where I really encourage you to think about the experiences that you had in the past where you received some email, someone said something to you, and your head went into a different place and for the rest of the afternoon or even days, you would ruminate over it or you would feel sort of that heaviness on your heart, on your shoulders, whatever it might be.

0:13:59 Ramona Shaw: This is exactly where that mask that we see on them, the way that we experience them, is now controlling us. It’s not controlling them. They went off and did whatever they wanted to do. They did not realize what was going on for you, most likely. So when that experience, that mask that we put on them is not helping us, it controls us. And this is where this unnecessary self inflicted drama in the workplace begins. We have an emotional response, we’re becoming reactive, less effective, we often lose focus, we might be intimidated, we start to have self doubt, our confidence starts to diminish.

0:14:38 Ramona Shaw: All of that because of what we think that other person is. So the solution to this is to one acknowledge that your perception is just a mask and not their identity. Like I was telling you earlier with my personal example where I realized, oh, I’m starting to put like this label on them, I’m starting to like glue this mask on their face. And at that point alarm bells need to go off to realize like, ah, this is what I’m doing and it’s going to be to my detriment. It’s going to impact my experience and my ability to do the best that I can.

0:15:16 Ramona Shaw: And I don’t want that mask to be controlling me. So first acknowledge it’s just a mask. I made that up. It’s my perception, my experience, it’s not the person. So when we work with someone we don’t like, acknowledge it’s not the person, it’s our perception that’s number one. And then number two is we want to get closer to that ideal perception that would actually be useful. So if I start to perceive someone as, let’s say, rude and arrogant, and I realize, ha, that’s the mask I put on them now, how is this going to impact me? When I think that I’m going to not be vulnerable with them or open or transparent, I’m going to avoid having to work with them. I’m not going to ask for their opinion. Most likely, I might be really defensive when it comes to my own opinion because I already anticipate them being rude.

0:16:09 Ramona Shaw: I might shut down and completely withdraw that. It depends a little bit on your own coping mechanisms here. But that may be sort of justifiable, let’s say a response to someone being rude and arrogant, but that’s, again, not helping. The ideal reality would be that I think of them not as rude and arrogant, but I think of them as someone with a strong opinion. If someone has a strong opinion, that actually could be useful, like, I like people with strong opinions, and I can then disregard the opinion if I don’t like it, or I can actually engage in a quite interesting dialogue.

0:16:47 Ramona Shaw: That new sort of mask that I just created is serving me a lot better. So now I have to change my mental images and internal dialogue about this person to match the mask that I’d like for them to wear. And the more that I change this internal dialogue, the easier will be for me to work with them. So I know this was kind of abstract, but I want to give you a more concrete example. Let’s say there’s a manager and a dialogue report. If I’m the diet report, and I experience my manager asking me for a lot of updates and giving me a lot of suggestions and wanting to be involved.

0:17:28 Ramona Shaw: That’s what I observe. And then I start to think, man, they’re a micromanager. I didn’t realize, you know, my first week here, but now, week two on the job, I realize my manager is a micromanager. And at that moment I put that mask on them. And now everything that they do, I see through that mask as the other micromanaging. So what I might do if someone is a micromanager and I find that annoying, I might avoid conversations.

0:17:57 Ramona Shaw: I might kind of like, withhold stuff because I don’t even want to get into the details and don’t want them to be involved. So I might not share certain conversations I’m having with other teams or meetings that I have to not have to deal with this Micromanaging tendency. I might also not deliver my best because I think they’re going to come back with a million inputs or red lines anyway. So why should I deliver the best possible draft if I know it’s all going to be ripped ripped apart and redone because of their micromanaging tendencies, right? If they rewrite every email or every report, why try to make it great in the first place?

0:18:34 Ramona Shaw: But because that’s my response to it, I’m actually letting that mask control me, right? I’m now not showing up as my best. And what does my manager see in me? My manager now sees that I’m withholding information, that I’m not being transparent, that I’m not putting forth great work. So what do they do in response to that? They’re becoming more of a micromanager. They’re going to ask me more questions and they’re going to be paying attention a lot more to the work that I submit because they realize it’s not right, it’s not quite meeting my expectations.

0:19:12 Ramona Shaw: So I have to help them, I have to edit, I have to level up their work for it to be okay. So that cycle is now completely self inflicted and it’s going to continue to run over and over and over again because the perceptions and that dynamic is reinforcing itself. So the way to break out of this again is going back to changing the mask and realizing when this is happening and I’m now realizing and being controlled by this mask by thinking they’re a micromanager start to change the way you think about it in that particular scenario I could say, well, what I really want is to see them as collaborative and as supportive.

0:19:55 Ramona Shaw: I could interpret someone asking me a lot of questions and redlining my report or editing my email as someone who is supportive and cares about my output. So if I now start to change my view on that, how will I then show up differently? And when I show up differently, the chances that they will respond differently is pretty high. And so the more that I work on my own perception of them, the more likely they are to change their perception of me. And we’re changing that dynamic.

0:20:30 Ramona Shaw: We’re working with someone we don’t like is maybe it’s like, yeah, still not my favorite person, but it’s now not negatively impacting you. It you are now not being controlled. You’re not paying that cost of loss of focus. Being reactive to them feeling stressed or feeling overwhelmed or feeling intimidated or having self doubt. All of these things that happen all the time in organizations and come at a pretty high cost. The productivity cost and performance cost. That’s that we is unnecessary. We don’t really need to pay if we learn these skills and are willing to look at the bottom of the iceberg when it comes to topics like this.

0:21:10 Ramona Shaw: And like I said in the beginning, when we do this type of work with leaders or organizations, we’re really looking at eliminating the unnecessary drama in the workplace through empathy, emotional management, and mental shifts. This was one part of this, and I hope you found this helpful and it inspired you to think about some of your workplace relationships or even personal relationships, but that it planted a seed. If you enjoyed this episode and you think other colleagues or friends who benefit from listening to this episode as well, please do share it along. And with that, we’ll see you next week in another episode of The Manager Track podcast. Bye for now. If you enjoyed this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader people love to work with.

0:21:55 Ramona Shaw: This includes a free masterclass on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out@archova.org/ Masterclass the second resource is my best solid book, the Confident and competent New Manager how to quickly rise to success in your first leadership role. Check it out@archova.org/books or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there. You can find all those links in the show notes down below.