This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
When you’re interacting with a colleague who you find challenging or who pushes your buttons, I have nine principles that I use to try to set the conversation or the interaction up for success, and I recommend that you use them as well. These are really the touch points or the foundation for having healthy interactions and for, ideally, transforming what might be a negative relationship into a positive or at least neutral one.
1. Know your goal.
One of the principles that I use most often is knowing what your goal is. It’s easy to just dive in to an interaction with your coworker and be so focused on either proving you’re right and they’re wrong, or just getting through the situation that you forget that you’re actually trying to achieve something. I really like to ask myself, what would success look like in this interaction? Write down all of your goals that you want to achieve with this relationship, then choose the one that is most important. Keep that in the back of your mind as you’re choosing how to interact and as you’re trying to really improve the relationship.
2. Focus on what you can control.
One of the principles is to focus on what you can control. You may think that you are going to convince your pessimistic colleague, for example, to have a more positive outlook, or you are going to influence your passive-aggressive peer to be a more straightforward communicator, but the chances are you’re not going to be able to succeed in doing that. Rather, what you can control typically is yourself. Now, I’m not going to tell you that you won’t change the other person, but if your success relies on your ability to do that, you are setting yourself up for failure. People change if and when they want to. And certainly you can show people why their behavior is not productive and how a different approach might be more successful.
But you’re much better off, and it’s a better use of your time, to focus on what you’re thinking, how you’re reacting, how you’re behaving in the moment, which will not only change the dynamic between you, but will also model the behavior that you hope to see from them. So continuously ask yourself, what is my role in this dynamic? How is my behavior influencing what’s happening here? And what can I do differently? If you’re exclusively focused on their behavior, what they’re doing wrong, then you’re not going to be inspired to make change yourself.
3. Experiment to find what works.
My favorite principle is to experiment to find what works. You probably would love a five-step process to get your biased colleague to stop committing microaggressions or to getting your victim colleague to stop thinking that everything is about them. But rarely do we have clear instructions for how to navigate these situations.
Rather, we want a menu of tactics that we can use and test out and see what works and what doesn’t. So you need to put on your scientist mindset and think about, what’s one thing that you want to try out, and then see what you learn. Did it work in this circumstance? What happened? Did your colleague respond well? And don’t give up if it backfires. Instead, say, okay, that tactic’s not going to work; let me try another one. And you continue to refresh your approach until you find the strategy that’s most effective for your unique situation and your unique colleague.