Employing Differences, Episode 179: How do we deal with this difficult person? (Part 1)

 

[00:00:00] Karen: Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.  

[00:00:13] Paul: I'm Paul Tevis.  

[00:00:15] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig.  

[00:00:17] Paul: Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "How do we deal with this difficult person?" Part one.  

[00:00:27] Karen: So this might be the number one reason I get hired, or at least the first question that I get asked is, "What do we do when we're in a group or an organization and we have a difficult person?" 

[00:00:40] Karen: And I'll just say, for framing this episode. We're gonna say we can't simply fire them. They're going to be here. They're part of our world. And what do we do about that? And I will say that usually the translation of what people are actually asking me is "How do we change their behavior?"  

[00:01:00] Karen: And so what we want to explore in this part one is sort of globally, how do we think about it? How do we approach it? How do we look at it from sort of a systemic kind of approach?  

[00:01:13] Karen: And then in part two, we'll address what do you do in the moment when there is a difficult behavior happening right now? So for this episode, looking at what can you do in a system where there is a difficult person? 

[00:01:31] Paul: And I think we might all have specific examples that are coming up to mind right now. Part of this conversation is inspired by a particular situation that I'm dealing with in a volunteer group that I'm part of. But I've also dealt with it in an organization. A canonical example in the software world, right, is the brilliant jerk. Or this person has difficulty relating to other members of their team and we can't fire them because they're too valuable.  

[00:01:56] Paul: And we go, "Oh, okay, we just need to fix that person." This is a thing that shows up in a lot of the work that I do as well, because that's often the assumption, right? 

[00:02:06] Paul: The assumption is that if we can just change that person's behavior, if we can upskill that person in some way. If we can get them to stop doing the problematic thing that they're doing, things will be better. And it's true. If they stop doing that, that it would be better. And that is one of the hardest paths to walk. 

[00:02:25] Paul: Like, it's a low percentage choice as one of my improv teachers would say. And I think we don't realize that. And we often think it's our only option.  

[00:02:34] Paul: So, as we said today, we've kind of want to explore why we think that that's not the only option. Why there are other things that we can do, why that's not the best option to choose. And to think about this from a 'strategizing about what we're going to do' standpoint. And then next week, we're really going to dig into, 'Okay, so how do we maybe put that into action?' Because knowing what we want to do, and then actually being able to pull it off in the moment are two different things. 

[00:03:00] Karen: And I think one of the places I want to start with is one of the fundamental fallacies about behavior in our society. And I learned this, among other places in my teacher training, where we had a management and discipline class. Where you're specifically, "How do you deal with behaviors?" And the concept there, that I think is absolutely true, is that behavior is about skill. Behavior is learned. Behavior is about ability. 

[00:03:28] Karen: And if you have a group of third graders and you want them to line up quietly for lunch, yelling at them and berating them is not the way to solve that problem. Giving them practice lining up quietly for lunch is actually the way to solve that problem.  

[00:03:43] Karen: And that's so opposite the sort of behaviorist approach that a lot of us grew up with. That, 'You know, if we just put people in timeout often enough, they will decide to do the right thing' kind of thing. 

[00:03:53] Karen: And I want to say, I don't think that's true. I think that emotional intelligence, there's both an innate- like, some of us are born with more of it. Like, we have more aptitude for it in the same way that some of us have more aptitude for math. And some of us have more aptitude for managing people, that kind of thing. 

[00:04:08] Karen: And it's a skill that we learned. And in our families of origin, in school, as we grew up in special training classes, we may have taken in our earlier career. All of this, these things are learning spaces where we learned some stuff.  

[00:04:23] Karen: So, if you've got somebody who is a full fledged adult and a member of a team, and they are a difficult person, I am going to premise that this is not because they are a selfish person. 

[00:04:35] Karen: This is not because they are wanting to cause people to dislike them, or they are somehow motivated to cause problems. I don't think this is the case. I think the case is... That through some combination of talent and skills, they aren't good at the relationship work. They aren't good at what we might call emotional intelligence, that kind of space. 

[00:04:59] Karen: And they aren't good at it for reasons. And I don't need to know what the reasons are. It may be past trauma. It may be, you know, capacity they were born with. It may be, you know, who knows what. Doesn't matter. But I think it's a useful thing in this conversation to start with the premise. That this is a person who's, for whatever reason, does not have a high aptitude for relationship work, and also I might say personal growth. 

[00:05:28] Karen: And this is why saying the solution to our collective group dynamic problem is for that person to get better at EQ stuff? Probably not viable! It's like saying we've got a big hairy math problem to solve. And we're going to turn to the person who didn't ever take more than algebra. When we've got a, you know, math PhD on the team.  

[00:05:52] Karen: You don't do that because you go to the person with the most aptitude related to the problem you're trying to solve. And in this case, the person who's making you aware of the problem, is not the person with the best aptitude to solve the problem.  

[00:06:09] Paul: There's so much packed into that that I just love. And one of them is we do have a tendency, particularly in organizations, to say, like, "Well, the person who points out the problem is the one who needs to fix it." And at the same time, you're pointing to the fact that, one, it's not true. Two, it's probably not useful. I come to this from a slightly different angle, and come to the same conclusion. Which is that in a lot of the work that I do, when we think about things from a systemic perspective, right? 

[00:06:34] Paul: So, Kurt Levine, who is sort of one of the founders of the discipline that's now called organizational development, he said, " Behavior is a simple equation. It's a function of the individual and the environment." And he said, "So if you want different behavior, you can either change the individual or you change the environment." 

[00:06:52] Paul: And then went on to point out how "Changing individuals is really hard" for a lot of the reasons that you've just pointed out. So he says, "Look, if you want people to behave differently, change what's going on around them." Because that's a way easier lever. And there's sort of a further nuance to that in some of the stuff that I teach, where we talk about particularly around conflicts, right? We noticed there's a conflict in a team, or in a group. And it's really easy to identify what's this person who's causing the conflict.  

[00:07:19] Paul: But if we actually step back out, we realize there's a whole lot of other factors at play that are way easier to address. In the sense that they don't require meddling with an individual's interpersonal skills, with their view of themselves, of their identity, of their deep seated beliefs, right? 

[00:07:36] Paul: Cause that's when you're talking about trying to upskill somebody often around these things is, a lot of the things that are in there. The behaviors that show up in interpersonal dynamics are really rooted in a lot of your inner learned behaviors from when you were young, all of these things that we'd have to pull out of the open, interrogate and mess with. And people just get annoyed when you do that.  

[00:07:55] Paul: Roger Harrison, who we've talked about before, you know, had this model of when you have this turbulence in a group. That the first thing you actually want to look at is the stuff that is closest to the surface and the outside, which are things like goals and roles.  

[00:08:11] Paul: We actually have agreement about what we're trying to do together because that's way less tied up in people's sense of personal identity. It's way closer to the surface and we can address those things. People get way less annoyed by that. And then we can get into this realm of sort of the dynamics within the group. 

[00:08:26] Paul: And looking at, "Okay, are we actually structuring our interactions in ways that are useful?", you know, and then we might go, "Well, that still isn't solving our turbulence problem." And we might keep going and there's a couple of layers down, that then we finally get to, "Yeah, we really do need to upskill this person in their interpersonal interactions", but that's like the last place you go. Because it's the most expensive. It's the hardest to do, it's the least accessible. 

[00:08:50] Paul: And so while it might be wonderful, if that person has a sudden revelation, they suddenly upskill, they suddenly become way better at picking up cues from their teammates. For softening feedback when it's coming off as too harsh, for strengthening things when it's too soft. Like, if they suddenly got better at it, absolutely. 

[00:09:07] Paul: It would address our problems. But it's a low percentage choice. It's really expensive. So it's not a useful avenue to pursue right out the gate.  

[00:09:17] Karen: Yeah. And I want to talk a little bit about why that is. And I'm going to take a little bit of issue with your use of the term 'annoyed', that people get annoyed when you challenge their identity, their self worth, their value to a group that like, I don't think annoyed is the word. 

[00:09:33] Karen: I think 'deeply unsafe' and 'threatened' at a like, existential level is probably a better description of what's going on emotionally in that moment. And that's why it doesn't work, is that when we feel threatened, and frankly, if somebody comes up to me and says, "You're the problem in the group", and "You're the one who needs to change your behavior", and "Nobody likes you because you're behaving badly", there is no part of my brain, there is no room in my brain for, "Hah! I should work on that. Where could I grow with that?"  

[00:10:05] Karen: This is not what happens. What happens is I go to my space in the group, my job, my livelihood, and even unconsciously, like, my ability to be in relationship in this group is in threat. And at very deep evolutionary, like, how our brain has developed levels, "If I get kicked out of every group I'm in, I will die." 

[00:10:29] Karen: Like, when I say existential, I mean it. I mean, it is life threatening stuff at an emotional level. And so we think we're being nice and we put all sorts of lovely flavor on it, but what's actually happening inside that person is "My life is in danger." And when my life is in danger, I go into defensive mode. 

[00:10:46] Karen: And when I go into defensive mode, I rely on my oldest, deepest childhood lessons, which is probably where I learned to be difficult to begin with. That is the whole way that plays out. And so what I want us to point to is that if we're hoping for change in that person, it still puts us at the place of 'go anywhere but them'. 

[00:11:08] Karen: Because what we want is the environment piece that you mentioned, which is if we can create an environment where there is greater safety for everyone, including this person. And even if this person is a lot of the source of the unsafety of the danger in the group or the turbulence, it's still the case that what we need is more safety. 

[00:11:28] Karen: And if everybody else can up their game, then we can increase the safety. Doesn't mean for sure that they're gonna change their behavior overnight, but it does a couple of things that are important. One is it increases the odds that they might be open to changing their behavior. So that's useful. 

[00:11:44] Karen: But the bigger thing is that we're looking at what is the impact of that behavior. And if we can change the impact of the bad behavior, we increase the safety for everyone. Which goes a long way towards solving the problem we started with. How do we deal with this difficult person? We reduce the negative impact of their behavior. 

[00:12:06] Paul: Yeah. And I think I want to explore that a little bit because sometimes the way that we try to reduce the negative impact. It's kind of by sidelining and marginalizing the person. And it's sort of pushing them to the outside. So we're less impacted by it. But what we're actually talking about is keeping them in the game, so to speak. 

[00:12:24] Paul: And at the same time going, "Okay, what are the problematic impacts of this behavior that we're experiencing? How can we lessen those?" So that when they occur. They disrupt the group less. They have less of an impact on people. Because as you point out, yeah, absolutely. If we're kind of pushing somebody out and going, "Ah, we'll just assign them to this committee where we never have to deal with them". Or the other thing that increases that safety threat, which makes it less likely that anything beneficial will happen. And it kind of, it plasters over the problem. 

[00:12:54] Paul: So we're not talking about doing that. We're talking about how can we identify what is it that this person is doing. And rather than saying, "What can we do to get them to stop doing that?" We're saying, "What could we do so that when they do that, it doesn't have the same impact on the group."  

[00:13:11] Karen: And I'll give a kind of a classic example of that. And it's just one example. In order to do this effectively, we have to think about what's the behavior that's the problem and what's the impact it's having. But one example is a behavior of making big, grandiose, confident statements that has the impact of everybody else just doesn't feel safe saying anything. 

[00:13:31] Karen: Like, they don't feel like they can put their ideas out there because this person just sort of, in the way that they framed their idea and the way that they said it, was just so big and confident. And sort of that it would feel like a put down, basically dismissed everybody else in their language. 

[00:13:46] Karen: Well, the problem isn't that they said what they said. The problem is that everybody else felt dismissed and didn't share their input and their ideas and their things. And I'm going to say that in that case. It's usually not true that those other people actually can't say anything. It's usually not the case that the meeting is facilitated in such a way that they don't have an opportunity to speak. 

[00:14:09] Karen: What's usually the case is that their emotional response, it's incredibly vulnerable and scary and uncomfortable when somebody has just made a grandiose dismissive kind of statement to be the one who sort of raises your hand and says, "I disagree with you."  

[00:14:26] Karen: But it's super valuable to do that. This is a case where if I can do my own work about my insecurities and my willingness to be vulnerable and my trust in the group to hold me with this and the group dynamics, if I can build up my own hesitation to stand up for myself. 

[00:14:44] Karen: Then I can actually almost completely eliminate that negative impact. Because as soon as 1 person gathers their gumption and says, " I actually have a different perspective on that and I don't think we should do it that way." Then that dismissive impact goes away because it opens the door for everybody else. 

[00:15:03] Karen: So this is a case where it's not that responding to the dismissive thing and being hesitant is bad behavior, but it's behavior that's not helping the situation. And so, yes, anybody watching perhaps would say that that big dismissive person is the problem. But that doesn't mean that person is the solution, which is what we saying. 

[00:15:23] Karen: And that there is a way that the rest of us, in changing our behavior, can engage in a way that eliminates the negative impact.  

[00:15:30] Paul: And this kind of gets to the second thing that and I have talked about, which isn't necessarily a completely separate thing. But it's about disrupting the resultant pattern of behavior, right? 

[00:15:41] Paul: So the pattern is this person makes this big dismissive statement. And then everybody else sits back and doesn't do it. And what we're, so we're talking about is going, how do, if that's the pattern that happens, if, and we can't stop the person from making the big dismissive statement, how do we enable somebody to do something different that shifts the pattern, right? 

[00:16:04] Paul: That someone steps in and says, "So I disagree with that. And here's what's going on, here's what I'm noticing". Then now we're in a different dynamic. Because we've now made it so that the story can have a different ending. We've taken a different path. 

[00:16:18] Paul: And so that's like brainstorming around and coming up with ideas for what are different responses that we can have to this initial behavior that will lead us to a different outcome. Because ultimately, I think the impact of that, going to your example, is that we just do the first thing that this person says, right? 

[00:16:39] Paul: We don't consider other alternatives. Like, that's really the impact. The impact is "We don't consider alternatives, so we don't make as good a decision as we could have otherwise." And the pattern that we're trying to break is letting the group be dominated by that one particular set of opinions. 

[00:16:57] Paul: And so how can we shift that? How can we shift it so that that pattern doesn't result? And there are a lot of different things we can do around that? If we've got an external facilitator who may be aware of it because they see it, not because they've been told about it. 

[00:17:09] Paul: Right. But sometimes, like, I've had this case where I'm coming into work with a group and they'll say, like, "There is a tendency for this person to do this thing and it has this impact on the group." And I go, "Oh, great. Good to know. Now I've got something in my pocket." I'm sitting on the outside and I can proactively work to disrupt that because I know it's going to happen. 

[00:17:28] Paul: And I'm not as emotionally impacted or compromised by that. Cause I'm kind of outside the group. And so I can try things. I have more options available to me. Or if we're inside the group, we're kind of going, "Okay, what could we do?" And sometimes there is that piece of like, it feels a little like a conspiracy at some point, but it's really about finding your allies around. 

[00:17:46] Paul: Like, "Do you have the same reaction to this thing that I do?" "Yeah." "Okay, great. What might I do?" If I know that I'm not the only person who feels that way, it becomes way easier for me to go, "You know, I'm probably the safest person in the room to disagree with this person." And going, "Okay, cool. It feels risky, but I know y'all have my back, so I'm willing to do it."  

[00:18:06] Paul: And so finding those opportunities, again, to disrupt, to shift the pattern. So that the behavior has less of an impact when it occurs.  

[00:18:17] Karen: So wrapping up this part one, when we identify we've got a difficult person, we have a pattern of behavior that is having a predictable negative impact. And we would like to address this situation.  

[00:18:29] Karen: The first thing we want to think about is It is not a motivation problem. It is not an intention problem. It is a skill set problem. It is an ability and an aptitude problem in the relationship, emotional intelligence kind of space.  

[00:18:42] Karen: And the person who is visibly the problem, the person that's making us see the problem, is probably the person with the least aptitude to solve it. And so how do we look for other ways?  

[00:18:56] Karen: And the goal that we're aiming for is to reduce the impact of the behavior. So, rather than taking on the behavior directly, which is likely to cause that person to feel threatened and defensive. Instead, if we can look at the impact and get thoughtful about how can we change the environment where that's happening and how can we change our response so that the impact of the behavior is less or maybe even gone. But as far less negative than what it would be if we keep doing what we've been doing where it's a problem.  

[00:19:28] Karen: And so if we can focus on that, the environment around everybody else's behavior, around how we respond to it, with the goal of changing the impact. We've actually got pretty good odds of improving the situation.  

[00:19:43] Paul: That said, doing that is not easy, which is what we're going to talk about next week in part two. So that's going to do it for us today. And until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.  

[00:19:53] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig. And this has been Employing Differences.