How to Work with Just About Anyone: A 3-Step Solution for Getting Difficult People to Change - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lucy Gill is an internationally known authority on the prevention and management of difficult and nonproductive behavior, and has been a Research Affiliate at the Mental Research Institute of Palo Alto—the only management consultant to be accorded that status. Her clients include Bank of America, Varian, Rockwell International, TRW, Sun Microsystems, and a number of Silicon Valley start-up companies.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

The Care and Feeding of Problems: How Difficult Behavior Gets Reinforced

What do you do about impossible people? You know the kind:

• The manager who hands you a rush project and insists that you drop everything to get it done. Then the completed report sits on her desk for a month -- just the way it did the last time.
  
• The ambitious colleague who frequently criticizes your work in front of the boss.
  
• The otherwise good assistant who is chronically late. She always apologizes, but the excuses are as annoying as her tardiness.
  

It's the chronic offenders like these who drive you crazy, not the people who occasionally irritate. You can cope with your manager's bad day from time to time. It's when she's having a bad life and taking it out on you that the frustration sets in. When people continue to annoy you no matter what you say or do, that's when you begin to believe that they will never change or that you will never cope -- that the troubled relationship (or your job) is doomed.

Not only can you get these people to change their habits, but you can do it with surprisingly little effort and without confrontation. Sound impossible? It's not -- once you know the right approach. You're about to learn the method that will take the trial and error out of changing anyone's troublesome behavior.

The (Not) Impossible Dream

This method is a result of four decades of research at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, primarily the work of the Brief Therapy Center project. In the beginning the founders of MRI studied all types of communication. Then, while analyzing how people handle problems, they discovered that people often get stuck in problems because they pick -- and then inadvertently repeat -- a solution that doesn't work. Their solution was, in fact, prolonging the problem. The researchers figured that the problem would disappear if they: 1) focused on these ineffective solutions rather than on the original problem; and 2) convinced their clients to try something significantly different. So they put aside the traditional diagnostic labels and techniques of psychotherapy and set out to test this hypothesis. Calling their work "brief therapy," the researchers challenged themselves to resolve clients' problems in a maximum of ten one-hour sessions. Over the years they developed and fine-tuned a unique formula that is extraordinarily successful in resolving impossible problems quickly.

Dr. Richard Fisch, John Weakland, and Paul Watzlawick, the senior team members, were curious to see whether their method would be as effective with business problems as it was with the problems of families and individuals. In 1984 I was invited to join the Brief Therapy Center's research team. At that time I had worked for twelve years as a management consultant in a variety of organizations, primarily helping teams function effectively and coaching managers on how to handle difficult and nonproductive behavior. We began to collaborate on business problems, blending the center's techniques with my consulting tools. For instance, if a protracted conflict in an organization was the result of a "systems" problem -- like inadequate definitions of people's goals or roles, ineffective communications channels, inappropriate decision styles, or work-flow bottlenecks -- then traditional consulting practices sufficed. Remove the cause of friction and the friction ceases. At other times, good management practices were already in place but the conflict persisted, perhaps due to individuals finding each other's habits intolerable. Then the center's three-step model was the better tool. When the cause of the trouble was a combination of these forces, then we used a blend of the methods. In the course of working on a number of problem situations, we discovered that the center's method worked as well with business problems as it had with individual and family difficulties. In fact, the process saved my clients a great deal of time, trouble, and expense.

This book will show you how to use adeptly the three-step process that resolves repetitive problems. You will learn how to:

• cut your problem down to size (you'll find that you have less work to do than you thought);
  
• figure out what inadvertently perpetuates your problem (you'll discover how much control you already have); and, based on that,
  
• select a new approach that will get you the change you want.
  

These three steps may appear simple, and they are -- as simple as programming your VCR. It's simple, that is, when you've read the directions. And when you've mastered these three steps, you'll know how to quickly get people to stop driving you crazy.

You'll learn some straightforward ways to get people to quit their annoying habits. You'll also learn some unusual solutions because, with repeat offenders, common-sense methods often don't work. For example, it may make good sense to simply ask your abrasive colleague to stop criticizing you in front of your boss. It is a logical approach and worth a try. But if it doesn't work, there is no point in trying it over and over. As you will learn, a significantly different approach will now be needed if you want your peer to change. Imagine telling him that you find his criticism useful and would like him to do it even more, especially in front of your boss. Sounds crazy, but a client of mine did exactly that and quickly got her peer to back off. You'll learn how to use such unusual but effective solutions, and many simpler ones as well.

If you've tried unsuccessfully to change someone's behavior, you already know what doesn't work. You're about to learn what does. Here's a preview of the first step in the process: identifying specifically what behavior needs to change.

Yes, Virginia, People Really Do Change

When repeatedly faced with a manager's or a spouse's irritating behavior, I have often heard people give up, saying, "What's the use? People can't change." It's how we console ourselves when we can't get someone to change. In effect, we're saying that our efforts didn't fail, but rather that the irritating person is like the tiger that can't change its stripes. While comforting, it doesn't do much to change those aggravating spouses and thoughtless co-workers.

The fact is, people change all the time. For instance, many of us change our behavior quickly when the CEO walks into the room. We probably behave differently with our colleagues than with our spouses. And it's not likely that we treat each of our children exactly the same (just ask them). We change our behavior all day long. But, you protest, that's not the same as the tiger changing its stripes; however, as you'll see, it's not usually the stripes that need changing.

The problem with saying "people can't change" is that the statement isn't specific. People can't change what, precisely? Let's say that you're frustrated with your hyperactive assistant who is still bouncing off the walls despite your efforts to change him. Before you declare that he can't change, you need to ask yourself: What specifically did you try to change about him? What problem does his hyperactivity create? To succeed at changing him, you have to work on the problem his troublesome behavior creates, not vaguely try to transform his personality. You probably don't really care that he has so much energy; you just wish he'd stop cracking his knuckles, drumming the table, and popping up and down in meetings. In other words, while you can't expect him to become Mr. Mellow, you can get him to stop his constant interruptions in staff meetings. Once you've attacked and fixed the specific problem his hyperactivity creates, you might find the rest of his high energy tolerable. You could even enjoy having...