When Better Communication Isn’t Going to Help You
You’ve been taught how to motivate people, how to communicate better, and how to get others to buy-in. You may have relied on popular personality inventories to help you align and collaborate with colleagues, and you may have read all the latest leadership books.
But all of those theories and tools tend to assume you’re dealing with reasonable people. What about the colleague who regularly bypasses the truth, the boss who harasses, or the employee who has no problem hurting others? What do you do when you’re working with or leading an unreasonable person?
Let’s break new ground and shed some light on the oft-neglected subject of unreasonable people.
Egosyntonic or Egodystonic
Generally, there are two categories of problematic behavior, egodystonic and egosyntonic.
Most poor workforce behavior is egodystonic. Most people don’t feel good when they behave badly. Most of us regret snapping at a colleague when we’re stressed, for instance, or we feel bad if we skip a deadline because we’re overwhelmed. Behaving poorly is dissimilar with our image of self. Therefore, our poor behaviors are egodystonic.
But there is a significant minority of the population that doesn’t care. Behaving poorly is not antithetical to their image of self. The supervisor who gets his kicks by putting others down or the coworker who always seems to spread mayhem wherever she goes. Unreasonable people perceive their poor behavior as “in sync” with their own perception of self. Everyone else has a problem, not them. Therefore, they are egosyntonic.
Some might think of personality disorders when they consider unreasonable people. Others might turn to brain function or past traumas. Regardless, unreasonable people tend to lack introspection, are chronically difficult, and tend not to change.
Leading Unreasonable People
Unreasonable employees can tip the critical mass of your organizational culture toward disfunctional or worse, yet organizations often fail to remove or contain them. That is why it’s essential for leaders to understand and act if they are leading an unreasonable person. The cost of inaction in this regard can be catastrophic.
Psychologist Alan Godwin teaches how to manage relationships with unreasonable people. Assess their level of commitment to dysfunction and guard your weaknesses. Forget about rationality and intentionality serving you, necessarily. And you will often need to establish and maintain firm limits and boundaries. Above all, don’t be naïve.
When confronting the maelstrom of drama frequently generated by unreasonable people, certitude, awareness, and consistency will become your most valuable allies.
Compassionate Leadership Rules
Productive conflict is normal, predictable, and often necessary for healthy teams, divisions, and organizations to thrive. And 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. In other words, once again, most problematic behavior in the workplace is egodystonic.
So it is essential that leaders not be lazy and label just any problematic behavior as unreasonable. When they do identify egosyntonic (unreasonable) behavior, a firm and steady mix of empathy and compassion is essential.
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