Imagine almost any leadership or organizational-psychology book you’ve read. It almost certainly taught you how to better influence people, how to motivate people, how to communicate better, how to get people to buy-in, and so on. Likewise, most of the popular personality inventories (DISC, Meyers Briggs, Predictive Index, etc.) describe personality types with corresponding strengths and weaknesses so we align and collaborate better with the people with whom we work.
Most of these resources are quite helpful, some life changing, but they tend to assume the people to whom we apply them are reasonable. What about the colleague who is willing to sacrifice the truth if being truthful means being wrong? What about the boss who has no concern about the consequences of his or her manipulative style? What about the employee who is a stranger to empathy and has no problem hurting others? What about unreasonable people?
This is the third in a Fern-EPC triad of short written works about understanding and interacting with the humans who surround us. The first was a post about how the brain is hardwired to avoid rejection and how traumas compound that predisposition. The second was an article explicating Dreikurs’ five goals of troublesome and unprofessional behavior.
I wrote both of those short pieces presuming the concepts therein would be applied to reasonable people. There is a significant minority of the population, however, who are not reasonable. This article is about them. How do you know you’re dealing with an unreasonable person? How is that different than interacting with a reasonable person? How should you adjust your expectations, and how do you respond productively?
Let us borrow two terms from the world of psychology to help us begin to understand the difference between reasonable and unreasonable people. They are egodystonic and egosyntonic.
Egodystonic and Egosyntonic
We can define the word “egodystonic” as thoughts, impulses, or behaviors that are unacceptable or inconsistent with one’s self-concept. In other words, when someone is abusive or difficult and they really don’t feel good about it. When I snap at my wife, for example. Usually, I’ve behaved poorly because I’m afraid or stressed, I usually feel bad about it afterward, and boorish behavior is inconsistent with the kind of husband I aspire to be. Thusly, when I’m brusque with my wife, my behavior is egodystonic.
Most disruptive behavior in healthcare is egodystonic. The exhausted surgeon who lashes out at staff. The radiologist whose work is suffering because he’s depressed. Or the avoidant executive who skips meetings because she’s been promoted to a leadership position that she, in her heart of hearts, fears she’s not good enough to fill.
Egosyntonic behavior, on the other hand, is behavior consistent with one’s self-image and, therefore, considered by the individual to be acceptable. The leader who feels zero discomfort when mistreating subordinates, the colleague who continually belittles and demeans others, or the employee with an insatiable need for attention. These are the unreasonable people. They feel entitled to the disruption they cause, and they are not likely to change. Unreasonable people are egosyntonic.
Some psychologists might think of “personality disorders” when talking about unreasonable people and egosyntonic behavior. The Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) lists 10. Narcissistic, histrionic, avoidant, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, and so on. If a colleague is suffering from untreated narcissistic personality disorder, for example, a motivational book isn’t going to help you much. If your employee suffers from untreated borderline personality disorder, it’s unlikely to show up on an organizational personality profile. A leader suffering from untreated histrionic personality disorder is unlikely to change because your company teaches better communication.
Others may speculate that unreasonable people are emotionally wounded, and wounds cause pathological behavior. Others would point to brain-chemical dysfunction or other innate causes, and so on. Regardless, the point is that unreasonable people cause harm, they resist self-reflection, and they tend not to change.
Psychologist and author Dr. Alan Godwin, the first to introduce me to the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable people, posits that unreasonable people create drama wherever they go, and they relentlessly entice others to join in their drama. Unreasonable people often lack humility, awareness, responsibility, empathy, and/or reliability. And they spurn introspection.
Once an unreasonable person gets under your skin and you join them in their drama, they’ve got you because you’ve entered their domain. You’ll risk ending up sick, crazy, or worn out.[i]
Unreasonable People in Large Organizations
The delivery of healthcare is more complex today than it has ever been. Patients are living longer and presenting more complex comorbidities. The range of diagnostic options has grown exponentially. EMRs and billing have become mind-numbingly complicated. Surgeries, emergency medicine, healthcare legislation and liability, medications; one could go on and on.
The point here is that physicians increasing rely on ever more complicated processes and procedures to do their work, and they increasingly rely on larger numbers of support professionals. Independent practice is an endangered species, and more and more physicians are bound to large healthcare organizations. Unreasonable people can exist in large systems because large systems are, well, large. Additionally, large organizations tend to rally around the status quo and reject change, even when the status quo is counterproductive or pathological. Translation: physicians and healthcare executives are often required to maintain relationships with unreasonable people.
Getting Got When Relating to an Unreasonable Person
There are several ways you can “get got” in relationships with unreasonable people, ways you might tolerate or even sustain their counterproductive behavior. Let’s return to Godwin’s work to name a few:[ii]
· You’re naïve, and you expect the unreasonable person to be reasonable. So, you give them the benefit of the doubt and try to reason with them. You’re a reasonable person, so you assume others are reasonable, too.
· You don’t set boundaries because you’re afraid. You fear their response, fear what others will think, fear how it will look, fear what will happen if you set limits, and so on.
· Incremental acclimation numbs you. They were good in the beginning. Then they were a little bit bad and slowly got worse and worse. Now they are causing big problems. You’re the frog in the frying pan that didn’t jump out when the heat was starting to rise.
· You are so bamboozled and knocked off balance by their manipulative behavior that you are unable to respond effectively.
· You conclude that you are the problem. You believe that you’ve brought it on in some way. If you were a better leader, better colleague, better communicator, better worker, then you would be able to get through to the unreasonable person.
· You don’t stand up to the problem because you lack confidence.
· You attempt to reason with them. If you just package it well enough, if you just say it right enough, they will understand.
· You are lost in confusion. Unreasonable people are good at causing confusion.
Unreasonable people have varying styles. They can be tyrants, victims, martyrs, passive-aggressive, and attention seeking. And their levels of persistence can vary, as well.
Often in leadership, the best course of action is to remove unreasonable people in the name of preserving the health of your team, division, and organizational culture. Sometimes, however, severance isn’t an option. So, what do you do if you’re required to interact with an unreasonable person?
ACTION ITEMS
Godwin teaches that unreasonable people have three levels of commitment to behaving poorly, and you should adjust your expectations and intention depending on which level you’re dealing with:
Low-Level Unreasonable: The goal of relating to a low-level unreasonable person is growth, possibly theirs but most likely your own. As the name implies, low-level unreasonables have low levels of commitment to their machinations. Their behaviors will tend to be less sophisticated and therefore easier to spot. Godwin’s advice: Get support while you try to hang in there.
Medium-Level Unreasonable: Godwin’s goal for relating to a medium-level unreasonable person is containment. When working with, reporting to, or leading a medium-level unreasonable person, you need to limit the damage their behavior causes and manage a chronic situation. Advice: Get support to stay sane.
High-Level Unreasonable: Typically, you won’t be working with high-level unreasonable people because their behavior tends to be so bad, they often self-destruct and are subsequently removed. However, if your situation requires you to deal with a high-level unreasonable person, your mission is to keep yourself and others safe emotionally, psychologically, and sometimes physically. Godwin’s advice: Get support to stay safe.
Several decades ago, when I first began my journey to become a professional listener, I took an internship in a boys’ prison. Some of the young men and boys there were egosyntonic and on their way to becoming unreasonable adults. Most were suffering, however, and simply acting out their emotional and psychological wounds. Most of them were egodystonic. That internship taught me how to love someone as they were spitting in my face, figuratively and literally. My interactions there taught me to trade the self-indulgence of feeling victimized for the delayed reward of nurturing potential. I learned to play the long game, to put my ego aside and keep focused on the healing of others. I learned that integrity is its own reward and to always consider that I might not fully understand. (Platitudes I regularly fail to live up to.) Subsequently, my mantra for working with unreasonable people: Take the high road. Take the high road. Take the high road.
Godwin emphasizes the importance of understanding—as best you can—the unreasonable person in your life. Assess their style and their level of commitment to dysfunction. Guard your weaknesses and be careful to not join them in drama. Let go of believing that rationality and intentionality will serve you, necessarily. Set and maintain firm boundaries. Receive support. And, above all, accept the relational limitations that come with relating with an unreasonable person. In other words, don’t be naïve.
Unreasonable people do tremendous harm to organizational culture. Yet, leaders often fail to contain or remove unreasonable employees because they lack the leadership skills or the courage to do so. Some hunker down and try to outlast pathological behavior because they are constrained by policy considerations, authority alliances, or bureaucracy. All too often, organizations tolerate unreasonable people because they are high producers, the Faustian bargain sometimes made by leaders and leadership teams.
Summary
The label “unreasonable person” can be counterproductive and hurtful when misapplied. Productive conflict is normal, predictable, and often necessary for healthy teams, divisions, and organizations to thrive. If you don’t have productive conflict, you’re lacking passion. Additionally, the dysfunctions of our healthcare system can act as a pressure cooker, amplifying and distorting productive conflict while taxing relational capacities. This often results in normal, reasonable people acting poorly. Problematic behavior usually comes from reasonable people trying to manage elevated stress, acting out unhealed emotional wounds or traumas, or displacing difficulty from some other context of their lives.
So, we must challenge ourselves to use speculation about unreasonable people carefully and to keep compassion and humility foremost in our hearts and minds. Laziness is the trap we can fall into, the laziness of failing to examine our own contributions to the relational conflicts in our lives, the laziness of using this information to project our own immaturities and misjudgments onto our employees, colleagues, or our bosses; to relegate them to the trash heap of disparaging labels and categories.
So, when an employee, a colleague, or a boss behaves poorly, start by assuming you’re dealing with egodystonic behavior. Start by assuming, for instance, that your “remedial” coaching requirement is, in fact, a developmental coaching opportunity, the chance to help someone grow or to heal. Empathy (sometimes of the more active variation) will often serve you best.
If, on the other hand, you are leading an unreasonable person, you will be required to monitor, contain, or remove them. If your circumstance requires on-going interaction with an unreasonable colleague or boss, remember to not be naïve, to receive support, and to always Take the high road. Take the high road. Take the high road.
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Brad Fern is an adaptive-change coach and licensed psychotherapist specializing in physician, physician leader, and healthcare executive development.
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[i] Alan Godwin is a psychologist in private practice in Tennessee. He wrote a book with Barb Gordon titled “How to Solve Your People Problems: Dealing with Your Difficult Relationships,” Alan Godwin Press, 2011.
[ii] Godwin Lecture.
