active listening

Angry Colleague? Here’s How to Respond.

Haig Chahinian

by Susan Shearouse

We’re grateful to be joined by Susan Shearouse, conflict resolution expert and author of Conflict 101: A Manager’s Guide to Solving Problems. In this post she examines a new angle on managing anger in the workplace — when it originates in someone else. -HC

You might not know what started it. Maybe it was something you said.  Or something someone else said.  Or something you didn’t say – and should have.  It might have been a conversation that went from bad to worse.  Maybe it’s been building up for a long time, and you are the last to know.   Whatever it might be, it’s your problem now.

This person is suddenly in your face, angry at you and quite vocal about it. Everybody up and down the corridor knows that you are getting the full dose of their fury.

Or – and sometimes this is even harder to face – they won’t speak to you at all.  They won’t return your calls any more.  If you pass in the hall, they look the other way, even if the other way is nothing but a blank wall.

What can you do?  How do you keep your cool?  You can turn a potential argument into a discussion if you can hold on to your own sense of calm and keep a strong determination not to be sucked into their negative energy.

  • First, know and understand your own responses to anger, your defensiveness, hot buttons. This is the first step in developing empathy for others.  It also helps you to be aware of, and less likely to be caught by, your own triggers.  If you can avoid responding in kind, you have gone a long way in changing direction. Read more →

Teachers Benefit from Revealing Themselves

Haig Chahinian

We often blog from the library of a graduate school of education, and recently we overheard an earful. A frustrated student teacher was talking with his peers about their high school students, and we gathered three (3) main points:

  1. He’s finding it increasingly hard to keep order in the classroom.
  2. Too many students have been prescribed psychotropic medication to manage behavioral issues.
  3. He’s devastated that his grandmother is seriously ill, and he’s trying to “be professional” and “hold it together” when he’s with his students.

If we were bold enough to approach him, we would have said this:

In light of your despair regarding your grandmother’s condition, why must you “hold it together” in class? Why not share your pain with your students? By revealing your current emotional experience, you accomplish so much:

  • You humanize your authority, which can help your students better relate to you. Being able to relate to you correlates with empathizing more with you, and your feelings. And nurturing your students’ ability to empathize may be the most important gift you give them, ever.
  • You unburden yourself from the unproductive work of “holding it together.” When you can share of your self without fear, you’re more relaxed. When you’re relaxed, you have more energy to listen actively to your students, who hunger for your focused attention.
  • The more nurturing you are with your students, and the more you listen to them, the closer you may feel as a class. From here, the difficulties of “keeping order in the classroom” may become more manageable.

If at this point he hasn’t scowled at us for butting in, we’d ask him where he learned that teachers are more professional when they hide who they are.

Get this: we know a school which is incorporating into the junior high school curriculum one teacher’s plan to donate part of his liver to his father. At this same school, another teacher shares with each new class his story of being adopted, so students can understand the complexities of different family structures over a lifespan.

Pretty revolutionary, yes? To publicize these seemingly private aspects of our lives in service of educating today’s youth is a radical–and totally effective–way to teach.

It may be challenging to implement at first, yet teachers who strive to share some intimate details of their lives will reap tangible benefits.

You follow, oh student teacher in the graduate school library?

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Challenges to Engaging Your Whole Self at Work

Haig Chahinian

A friend of ours, “Karisma,” last month attended a two-day course on lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) issues in the workplace, and left with her head spinning. What happened may surprise you.

She’s a counselor in a New York City high school, and two colleagues attended the learning program with her. We connected when she was somewhat distressed shortly after the seminar; the primary issue, in her words, was:

I tried to ‘come out’ at work during a two day training and it was a disaster for me. Internally I felt so upset I cried all the way to the ferry, obviously not a good look. I’m better now than I was, but I am still thinking about Monday and my re-entry to work.

Like many people, Karisma has preferred to separate aspects of her work life from her personal life, so the struggle to reveal her self to her coworkers is real. Still, by thinking hard about her actions and feelings in the context of her job, she’s well equipped to reap the rewards of revealing and engaging her whole self at work. Let’s look at how the events unfolded.

Karisma relates how the opening go-around began: Read more →

The Goodness of Bad Feelings at Work

Haig Chahinian

During the course of the day, many of us shy away from bad feelings. You know the ones: the day’s coasting when you see, or hear, or remember something and immediately feel embarrassed, or guilty,  or doubt-ridden. “Buck up,” and “soldier on,” you think to yourself, platitudes that fall flat.

Which is why Pooja Nath, founder of Piazza.com, didn’t recite these phrases to herself when she felt bad as a college student studying in the computer lab. Profiled recently in the New York Times, Nath’s story goes like this:

When Pooja Nath was an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, an elite engineering school in India, she felt isolated. She was one of the few women on campus. While her male classmates collaborated on problem sets, Ms. Nath toiled in the computer lab alone.

“Back then, no one owned a laptop, there was no Internet in the dorm rooms. So everyone in my class would be working in the computer lab together,” she said. “But all the guys would be communicating with each other, getting help so fast, and I would be on the sidelines just watching.”

The experience as a young woman in that culture formed the foundation of her start-up in Silicon Valley, Piazza.

About her company, a homework help site:

Students post questions to their course page, which peers and educators can then respond to. Instructors moderate the discussion, endorse the best responses and track the popularity of questions in real time. Responses are also color-coded, so students can easily identify the instructor’s comments.

Although there are rival services, like Blackboard, an education software company, Piazza’s platform is specifically designed to speed response times. The site is supported by a system of notification alerts, and the average question on Piazza will receive an answer in 14 minutes.

You see that? Those crap feelings you sometimes experience on the job can help you find fame and fortune. The task is not to silence your emotions, but rather to tolerate them, and listen to them.

If you can do this, your bad feelings may help you make decisions about your professional path. How great is that?

One last bit that floors us: the average question on Piazza will receive an answer in 14 minutes. What does this mean? Yes, the technological infrastructure of Nath’s business is impressive.

Also, there’s an ever-increasing expectation that we are always in front of a screen. Which makes us feel scared, and anxious as we consider the prospect of being in front of a back-lit screen at all times.

We’ll tolerate these uncomfortable feelings, open to the goodness they may still bring.

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Come Out at Work: With Graves’ Disease

Haig Chahinian

Superstar Missy Elliott has revealed that she’s living with Graves’ Disease, the autoimmune disease linked to an overactive thyroid gland. Symptoms can include insomnia, irritability, heat sensitivity, muscular weakness, eye changes, lighter menstrual flow, rapid heart beat, and hand tremors. In a public statement she said:

I was diagnosed with Grave’s Disease about three years ago but it really hasn’t slowed me down at all. I rocked my performance on VH1 Hip Hop Honors’ tribute to Timbaland last year. I’ve written and produced a bunch of Grammy-nominated, #1 hits… I toured the UK, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. And on top of all that, I’m working on my new album. I feel great. Under my doctor’s supervision, I’ve been off medication for about a year and I’m completely managing the condition through diet and exercise.

While Elliott may not be in tune with the nuanced influence of her physical condition on her work, we can sense the relief she feels in relating her life events of the last three years. She simply wants to be heard and understood.

It seems so simple: being heard and understood on the job. Yet experiencing both can be truly powerful, and bring you great joy.

Have you listened to — and understood — a coworker of yours today?

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Follow Whims, Increase Productivity?

Haig Chahinian

Admit it: at work you sometimes wander over to YouTube to “conduct research.”  And there are times when you’ve played solitaire to distract yourself from a mundane–or especially complex–task.

Well good for you! When you listen to your whims, you often increase your productivity.

James Surowiecki writes in the New Yorker about the benefits of distraction, and cites some interesting studies which conclude that a worker’s impulse to take a break is typically aligned with an organization’s pursuit of higher output. Consider this:

A new study, done at the University of Copenhagen, asked participants to perform a simple task—watch videos of people passing balls and count the number of passes. … One group of participants had a funny video [first] come up on their screens; the rest saw a message telling them that a funny video was available if they clicked a button, but they were told not to watch it. … The curious result was that those who hadn’t watched the comedy video made significantly more mistakes than those who had.

Turns out that following rules can sometimes be more problematic than following personal desire–in this case, to watch a humorous video.

To be sure, we’re not advocating the total disregard of organizational policies in favor of doing whatever you wish. We’re thinking critically about how to match your internal drives with workplace realities, knowing it’s almost always possible to find a fit.

Sometimes, our brain needs a rest to process abundant or complicated data. Time reported on a study about our brains at rest by neuroscientist Lila Davachi at New York University. “Your brain is doing work for you even when you’re resting,” says Davachi. “Taking a rest may actually contribute to your success at work or school,” she adds.

So don’t feel bad about taking a short respite from the daily grind to read Whole Wide Work. Rest assured, you and your place of work will be better off.

What benefits of resting on the job have you experienced?

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The Best Way to Work With an Angry Colleague

Haig Chahinian

Yay research! A study conducted at Temple University concluded that instead of punishing employees who exhibit extreme anger, supportive responses by managers and co-workers can promote positive change.

Published in the journal Human Relations, the authors of “The trouble with sanctions: Organizational responses to deviant anger displays at work” state:

when companies choose to sanction organizational members expressing deviant anger, these actions may divert attention and resources from correcting the initial, anger-provoking event that triggered the employee’s emotional outburst.

So rather than engage with your colleagues in a superficial manner, it helps to relate with them more deeply. Listen to the emotional tenor of your conversations, and you may hear a whole spectrum of feelings — anger, sorrow, defeat, uncertainty, excitement, hope, we could go on.

And when you do, you may be in a position to help your coworkers cope with their difficulties. You’re also better equipped to manage your own workload because:

1) you glean useful information about the organization’s projects by being so attuned, and
2) you build closer relationships, which will serve you when you’re the one looking for help.

What about your own anger? We’ve been asked by a reader to explore concrete ways to channel anger more productively.

Start by acknowledging your irate feelings, then identify the specific source or target of your fury. Once you’re able to understand what has ticked you off, and why, we can then apply these researchers’ findings to your experience. Have compassion for your self, which will likely bring about compassion for your colleagues, in turn. This emotional intelligence becomes the basis on which to resolve the situation and your related bad feelings.

We’ll revisit the topic of managing anger at work; there’s so much to discuss when it comes to leveraging at work everything you have inside you.

Under what circumstances have you worked with an angry colleague? How did you manage?

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