SuperManager Podcast: De-escalating/Reducing Drama at Work
Christine: You’re listening to SuperManager, the podcast for people who manage people and business with ideas, trends, and expert interviews to help you be a SuperManager.
Sam: Okay. Welcome to another episode of SuperManager podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about deescalating and reducing drama at work. And I have some of my super friends with me here today. We have,
Katie: Katie Magoon with People Solutions Center. We’re an HR consulting firm.
Mary: And Mary Kutheis with MCK Coaching and Training. I am a business coach and confidante.
Sam: And of course me, you hear from me every week. Samantha Naes with CN Video. We do corporate video production. So I worked with an employee one time, perfectly pleasant person, but tended to vent a lot. So he’d be talking with the customer on the phone and everything seemed to be going well. And then he’d hang up the phone and he’d go, “Oh my God,” you know, and just kind of vent about how horrible it was. And then I realized he was doing that with people in general with everything that he worked on. And I kind of felt sorry for him because it must not feel good to feel that level of frustration in dealing with people and have it be part of your job. But it was affecting people around him. Other people were starting to do the same thing and they were starting to feel the anxiety and it became kind of an office of bitching and complaining. And so you have one person who’s having kind of an issue and they don’t think it’s a big deal, but it can really cause kind of a domino effect and affect other people around them. So that’s one example of drama and how it affects a work environment but what is drama?
Mary: Gosh, it can be as small as who didn’t clean up their mess in the microwave to harassment. I mean it really can be a huge gamut. And interestingly sometimes the really small issues create enormous amounts of drama and taking away focus and productivity because of that drama.
Sam: Well, it seems to me that if it’s a small issue causing a large amount of drama, it’s not the issue that’s causing the problem. It’s not somebody not cleaning the microwave. There’s something else behind it.
Mary: I think what for many people that shows a lack of respect or a lack of responsibility, and so again, it’s, it’s maybe not that it would take someone else five minutes to actually clean up somebody else’s mess, but people feel like someone’s not pulling their weight and maybe they feel the same way about the work they do or that someone feels like, well, I’m so busy I shouldn’t have to clean up the kitchen, even if I make a mess and I’m, I’m focusing on the kitchen, there’s a lot of smaller issues like that.
Sam: Or why is it my job, am I so unimportant that I’m cleaning up after somebody else?
Mary: Yes, yes. Yeah.
Katie: The other piece that comes sometimes, you know, you mentioned harassment, which is obviously the extreme side of it, but one of the things I’m seeing more frequently, and it’s kind of scary when you see it happening, it’s actually bullying in the workplace. Um, and I’ve heard clients say like, what do I do if I have a bully in the workplace? I’m like, you do have adults. Right. Um, but it is becoming more of a norm where there will be one individual in the organization who has kind of pointed themselves as being in charge, whether they are or not, and they will literally shame and push people into a situation where no one feels like they can give the feedback and it’s often not the leader. It’s often someone in the team that has sort of appointed themselves in that space because they’re just not confident in their own work. That one can cause a ton of drama because everybody’s afraid of what to do about it.
Mary: Yeah. It’s interesting because looking back on that person’s history, they may have been a bully in high school. And it’s never addressed. Maybe the parents didn’t know how or didn’t know it, and as long as they get away with it, it happens in college, then they get hired somewhere and the bullying behavior continues.
Sam: They probably don’t even realize that they’re doing it.
Mary: I was even thinking about that guy who gets off the phone every time he says, “Oh my God”, it would be interesting. And maybe he did realize he did it, but if someone said, “do you know you do this?” Because maybe it’s like, “seriously every single time, I had no idea.” People get into such habits, they don’t even realize they’re doing something that off-putting. Yeah.
Sam: His response was, “oh, I don’t mean anything by it. I’m just blowing off steam.” He just didn’t realize how it was affecting everybody else in the office.
Mary: Interesting. Yeah.
Katie: And that kind of negativity one has huge impact on your customer service. And when you, when you’re always, oh the customer is always wrong, the customer is always wrong. Right. Even if you would never say that to the customer, it changes people’s perspective on it. So the drama bleeds over whether you think it does or not. But the other part of it is if people are getting so wound up in the drama, it can take a good 10 to 15 minutes for somebody to come back down,
Sam: Right.
Katie: Off of that. So there’s 10 to 15 minutes where all somebody is doing is venting and they’re not getting anything accomplished. And so when you have a whole group, especially if people work in small orders now that’s 10 to 15 minutes every time somebody hangs up the phone with a client that nobody’s getting anything done. Or if it’s person to person, like it’s 10 to 15 minutes of the gossip and all of this stuff that happens and it’s only creating the negative emotions and thriving on that and meanwhile you’re getting zero work done.
Sam: Unfortunately, I’m one of these people that I can’t stand to be around drama and when something like that does happen, I, it does take me awhile to shake it off and I’ll try to focus on work and then I’ll go, “Oh, I can’t,” you know, and I just have to go take a walk or something just to kind of let it out before I can start focusing on work again.
Katie: Yeah. The hard part is when it’s in your personal life, if you’re somebody who doesn’t like to be around drama, it’s pretty easy to pick and choose your friends and decide. That’s not somebody I’m going to spend a lot of time with. When it’s a coworker, you don’t quite have the same option. You know, you can’t vote people into the closet. So you know, you have to figure out a way to start to bring that drama to light or find ways for the team to deal with it. And it’s just not as easy as saying, I’m not gonna invite that person to lunch anymore.
Mary: And that is a leadership function, to be aware of what’s going on, because a leader needs to have good people skills. That statistic that 90% of the difference between average and superior leaders is their level of emotional intelligence because you’re dealing with people, you’re leading people. So the leader needs to have their finger on the pulse of what’s going on and they need to address those kinds of things. Cause if they don’t, they’re not doing their job.
Katie: Yeah, absolutely.
Sam: Mary, you mentioned distinguishing the difference between difficult and different. What did you mean by that?
Mary: When I do training on communication skills. I’ll often ask the audience, and especially if everybody is in the same company, how many of you have or have ever wanted to take a class on dealing with difficult people? And almost everyone will raise their hand, and I say, okay, look around because these are the people that you work with and they may perceive you as difficult. And you perceived them as difficult and they may perceive you as difficult and there are some people who are just difficult, but in many cases they’re just different. You were talking earlier about discs and the behavioral styles and behavioral styles can rub people the wrong way. If you just think someone is being the way they’re being because they’re trying to make you angry or they’re trying to get at you when it’s really just how they are. So understanding that people are behaving in their natural way often helps people see, oh, they’re just a really direct person where I’m not quite so direct. That helps.
Katie: If you can start to change the conversation. One of the things we talk about all the time is how do you get people to lead with stories that assume good intent. And when your mind is talking from an assumption of good intent, you finish the story in a much more positive way. As soon as you lose the assumption of good intent, now the person is sabotaging you or undermining you or doing something intentional to cause you problems. And a lot of drama in the workplace comes from the fact that as a team you haven’t figured out how to lead with that assumption of good intent.
Mary: That’s an excellent point.
Sam: And Katie, you had mentioned a lack of trust that kind of ties into what you had,
Katie: It drives that assumption of good intent. So if I trust you, I’m more likely to assume that you just made a mistake or you just are having a bad day. In fact, I’m more likely to jump to the conclusion that, ooh, I wonder what I did. So if I trust you and you get mad at a meeting and you slam out and walk out the door, my initial reactions were like, what did I do wrong? If I don’t trust you and you slam out and walk out the door, my reaction is what a jerk, how rude are they? But you go in a very different direction. And so the underlying concept is if you can build the trust, then the drama will start to dissipate because it allows people to lead with that assumption of good intent.
Sam: And I think a big part of drama that I’ve seen has been gossip. Like you’ve done something that bothers me and I don’t have that trust with you, so I’m going to go to you this other person and say, did you see what she did? What do you think about that? You know? And then you kind of get the gossiping thing going on. That to me feels also like a lack of trust because if I trusted you, if we had that kind of relationship, I would just say something to you directly.
Katie: There is a ton of data out there that says for most people on the list of behaviors that destroys trust. Gossip is one of those key behaviors that destroys it. On the flip side, when you ask people you regularly engage in this behavior, the answer is yes and so we know it breaks trust and yet we do it anyway and sometimes with people who we actually like, I’m not sure. What about the humans like you makes that happen.
Mary: I think one of the things might be how conflict avoidant people are. They won’t address the conflict with the person. They’ll address it with someone else because they feel more comfortable doing that and it’s because they don’t have the skills to address it in a way that won’t feel like a confrontation. Yeah. It needs to feel like a discussion and then it’s more comfortable. Yeah, but I love the way you said the assumption of good intent. If you go into it, assuming that you’re going to have to straighten somebody else out because their behavior has been bad, that that’s going to come across instead of coming across with, this is how I felt when this happened. Can we talk about that? Yeah, and that is much less backing someone into a corner, much less aggressive. It’s let’s team up to figure out what’s going on here and make it better.
Sam: Well, if you think about it, people have learned the skill that they need in order to do their job, but where do they really teach you how to handle these types of situations and how to effectively communicate with someone who’s done something that you’re upset about or confused about or or whatnot. We’re all just there to do our job.
Mary: Well and honestly that’s one of the reasons why people bring me in. I know it’s probably the same thing for you, Katie, is that people need those skills. I’m certified in the emotional intelligence, the EQI 2.0 as well as some other assessments. And when people can see through science how they’re coming across, people who are interested in personal and professional development will say, I need to fix this because this isn’t working for me. Sometimes they don’t even realize what’s happening. They just realize they’re not getting results that work for them. And so somebody from the outside can come in and say, here’s what I see going on and we can fix it if you’re willing to work on it.
Katie: Sometimes too. I’ve had some really good leaders that have teams that are working well and there’s just that one little nuance of drama that seems to be happening that’s keeping them from being a great team. And those are the organizations because they already have a reasonably good foundation of trust. It’s so easy to take that and escalate everything a little bit further because now I do trust you in general. So if I teach you the right sets of words to use now when you start engaging in something that’s drama, I might be more willing to have that conflict in that conversation. The other thing is if I trust you now when you come over and gossip, I feel like it’s my responsibility to point out, you know, I might just be the recipient of your gossip, but I’ll say, you know what, Sam, I’m not sure this is the right conversation for us. Let’s talk about if you have a concern, how might you better address that with the person you have it with, but actually call it out in the moment. Because most of us allow the gossip to happen and that creates a culture in which it’s acceptable. And then you leave the room. And I wonder, well, I wonder what she said about me after she left here. So if we don’t get in the habit of calling each other out and stoping it in the moment, even a good team can have some erosion of that trust over time.
Sam: And I think what’s interesting about that is a lot of times I think people gossip as a way to bring themselves closer to the person that they’re gossiping with. And really what they’re doing is they are losing trust. Because I have had people approach me to gossip about somebody else thinking that we were going to bond over this. And I did walk away thinking, I wonder what they’re saying about me. It just didn’t have that effect.
Katie: Giving people the right words, the conversations on disc, the ability to have conflict in a way that’s productive a lot of times is just giving people the right sets of words to say as opposed to you did this and it made me feel bad and hey, help me understand what happened yesterday. Because now again, you lead with that assumption of good intent help me understand, which does have to sound like the nice version. There’s the snarky version of help me understand, I don’t want to use that one. But when you can get people to start to ask those kinds of questions, you change the conversation dramatically. So the training and sessions make a huge difference in that.
Mary: I agree it’s that, many times people aren’t refusing to do the right things to keep the culture or create the culture that they want. They just don’t know how because they never learned it anywhere. As you said, they know how to do their job, but the people skills are often things that need to be developed.
Katie: I do a class that’s called creating a culture of respect that at the end of it we talk about the severe HR stuff, right? The discrimination and the harassment. But during the course of it, we actually use case studies of these exact kinds of situations and get the team to come to an agreement on what does it mean to have a culture of respect. Why do you care if there’s a culture of respect? And then most importantly, what are the behaviors that are acceptable and unacceptable? And while we ultimately want them to understand that harassment and discrimination need to be on that list as well, it usually starts with things like we’re not going to gossip about each other. We’re not going to tell inside jokes. We’re not going to yell at each other. And so that’s where when you can get an organization to that point, then you’re not going to run into the harassment situations because people just know that’s not how we operate here.
Sam: So what’s the best way to create a culture like that? I mean, I know obviously you can tell people coming into the organization that this is our culture and these things are important, but saying is one thing, but actually creating that culture and meaning it is another,
Mary: One of the things that I think every organization has to do and it has to start with a leader is developing their core values and they cannot be core values that are created as a marketing tool to look good to the outside. They have to be core values that are believed by the leader in top management and then driven down through the organization. So if teamwork is one of your core values and yet you let people hoard information, then you’re not living them and people will no longer pay attention to them. So it’s established what truly matters to you and not only require but provide support to the rest of the people in the organization to live by those core values.
Sam: So you need to, as a leader, you need to notice what’s going on. You need to intervene and show people that this is how it’s done, that this isn’t acceptable and then others will follow. Others will see that that’s unacceptable. They’ll feel more comfortable.
Mary: And I think it’s also, and I think this is another podcast, but it’s part of, you get the right people in the company when you have established your core values because you can align people and get the right people who are already aligned with that coming in.
Sam: That is a whole other discussion because that’s, that’s weeding through what people say and what they mean and that whole thing. Mary, you had an interesting comment about elevators versus escalators. I’m kind of curious about that.
Mary: It’s when people are in a conversation and if something hits you wrong, you can either decide to escalate the tension by reacting to it. You know, kind of like your lizard brain that says, I’m gonna fight-
Sam: You can’t talk to me like that!
Mary: -Exactly. Or you can elevate the conversation and it’s like take the emotion out of it and turn the tone of the conversation because the other person may have come in hot and the person that’s being talked to does have the option of cooling that off a little bit by listening and letting them vent a little bit without taking it personally and when they’ve had their say and not trying to rebut immediately, just using emotional intelligence skills to be a good listener, understand where they’re coming from. Perhaps not even try to come up with a solution while they’re still hot, all those kinds of things so you can escalate it and make it worse or you can elevate it and take it to a more professional productive level.
Sam: The story that you were telling kind of brought up an interesting question for me when you said not to escalate, even if someone’s coming in hot, don’t take it personally. That’s assuming that one person is using emotional intelligence and obviously the other person, the one coming in hot is not. So at what point do you say, okay, this person is doing a good job of deescalating, but what do we do about this one person who is causing other people to have to deescalate?
Mary: In my experience, it may be that this person is always a person who comes in hot or it may just be they’re having a really bad day. If they really don’t have the skills they need to get them, and that’s where their leader, their management needs to recognize this person doesn’t have the skills they need. They either need a coach and they need training or they need a mentor- they need somebody who’s going to help them see how they’re coming across and give them some better tools.
Sam: Give them the benefit of the doubt initially, but if it’s a pattern or something that continually happens, then get them some help in, in learning how to better deal with these situations. All right, well we’ve come to the point of the horror story of the week. And Katie, I’m going to, you, you’re the queen of horror stories.
Katie: I’m not sure that’s the title I was looking for. Um, I had a team that just, bullying was part what was happening. Um, what was interesting was one individual in the organization would bully new hires and it came from a place of fear for her. She thought the new folks were coming in to take over the role, but the kinds of things that she would say to the new hire, and of course this is the person they put in charge of orientation, right? So in orientation there was this immediate sense of you have to do it my way. It doesn’t matter that even the handbook says this, it doesn’t matter what the manager says, this is how we do things here. And then immediately, like the constant bashing of somebody new and somebody just putting people down to the point that truly it’s amazing in a workplace that people can actually completely lose their confidence and they start to believe the bully. And this one, while they weren’t the leader, they had just enough of an informal leadership role. This woman had at least 75% of the staff absolutely terrified of her, been there 15, 20 years and everybody knew it was a problem, but nobody would talk about it and there was no hope in sight of the person retiring, which would’ve been the easy answer. And honestly they just kept losing person after person and everybody was, everybody was running from her and it doesn’t matter the age, I mean she was in her fifties and you know, it’s sad to watch it happen because it can ruin people’s personal lives as well because they take that bag at home.
Sam: Oh sure. Well, and the sad thing about that is the employees that leave are probably very good employees and the ones that stay don’t have the confidence to do the job as well as they could be doing it, so.
Katie: Well and they’re doing it her way, whether it was the right way or not, so it didn’t really matter.
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