Do you have a customer who just cannot be satisfied? Do you feel like you clash with your colleagues on estimates? Is someone getting under your skin? Sure, there are people who are simply difficult and persnickety. But personality disorders are the exception; trained or learned behaviors are much more the rule.
Has the system you are working in created these monsters you work with? Have they learned that negative behaviors are required for success in the organization? Far too often, this is the case. People who maintain active friendships and healthy, loving relationships are – at work – terrible people to work with. People who have decent IQ’s become – at work – unreasonable and seem to have lost touch with cause-and-effect or lost any grip on logic. How has this happened? And how do we push through and work with them successfully?
Try to analyze the system. Find the reinforcement.
Performance management systems, internal politics and management styles are among the many systems or areas where you can look to find out how a persons behaviors are being reinforced and encouraged. If only those with the loudest complaints get any attention, the system is training customers to complain with gusto. If employees do a lot of their work quietly and on their own time in order to keep their jobs, they are “training” their management team to keep up the unreasonable expectations (“Joe is doing x, why can’t everyone?”). People tend to repeat actions that have proven successful over time. Find out what motivators are in place, what information or misinformation is guiding decisions, and what benefits people receive from their behaviors. Be empathetic, listen, observe, and assess. The behaviors and actions that may seem baffling at first may come to be understandable and to be reinforced actions.
Change the systems that support behaviors.
Organizations are made of interacting and often complicated systems, but people behave to achieve expected results within the organization. If you don’t like their behaviors, it may require a change to the system. For agile teams, adjust performance goals from independent goals to team goals and drive team-first behavior. Where you are finding team members to be underestimating all of their tasks, look within the system to see if there is a culture of punitive repercussions for not meeting aggressive deadlines. Within punitive organizational cultures, you will find people hedging estimates, placing blame, under-cutting quality to push things along, and hoarding information. Fix the culture, fix the system, and you will find that the negative behaviors begin to fade in popularity.
Actively reinforce the behaviors you want to see.
Most of us tend to focus and attend to negative behaviors. Our attention (look at the daily news, for example) is drawn to negatives much more than to positive behavior. We discuss bad weather more than we discuss pleasant days. We discuss issues with people to a much greater level of detail than we talk about how helpful a person has been or how nice it was to meet someone. Drama of the negative sort captures our attention. But you can stop a person in their tracks by pointing out and giving recognition to a great and positive behavior. A “Thank you” should really be a given, but sincere gratitude and acknowledgement is what you can use to promote positive actions. Drive behavior to match your expectations by reinforcing the things you want to see.
Not all interactions can be fixed through managing motivators within the organization. Not all of the difficult people we work with can be incited to be fabulous members of the organizational community. But it’s worth a try to step into their shoes to understand what may have helped them become the way that they are. Deming would have looked within the system for the issue. We can follow his tried and true example and look within our own organization and its systems for ways to encourage the best of all of us.