Dealing With People You Can’t Stand – How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst?

Ask the Expert

QUESTION:

I work with some really difficult people at work.  Buncha grenade-throwing sniper whiners that say no to everything  because they think they know-it-all.

If you try to help them their battle cry is not only “NO” … but also  “No Good Deed Will Go Unpunished,” for trying.

Help me out here.

What are some of the behaviors you recognize in people at their worst and how can a person successfully deal with them so everyone wins?

ANSWER: By Dr. Rick Kirschner, co-author of the international bestseller “Dealing with People You Can’t Stand: How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst.”

Well you know, everybody is somebody’s difficult person, so we’ll just start with that. I define a difficult person as somebody who does something that you don’t want them to do, or doesn’t do something that you do want them to do and you don’t know what to do about it. In my interviews with people over the years, it seems that there are about 10 signs of consistent bad behavior that drive people crazy and all of us are probably good in at least one or two of these.

THE TANK (AKA in some companies as the CFO or Treasurer)

The first one is what we would call the tank attack and this is where you hear the tread coming down the hallway and then the radar switches on and if you show up in the crosshairs then you have a problem. You’ve got a really pushy person, they take control, they try to take control of you. It seems incredibly personal in the irony but it’s not personal at all; they’re trying to eliminate an obstacle and they think that’s you.

THE SNIPER

Another type of difficult behavior is the sniper attack and that’s where we say you have two kinds of snipers.

We’ve got friendly snipers. Those are people that just love to tease and quite honestly, when you travel a lot, you find lots of folks who like to tease. It’s a really fun way for us to try to keep ourselves awake. So that’s friendly sniping and yet some people are so dead skinned (sp?) that it hurts them when it happens so it makes that a difficult behavior for them.

There’s another type of sniping and that’s hostile sniping. That’s where somebody literally isn’t in control so they’re going to take you out of control and there’re all kinds of ways that plays out. The bottom line is that snipers can’t snipe if you don’t let them.

THE GRENADE (AKA IN SOME COMPANIES AS THE PR GUY)

Then there’s the grenade, the human grenade. Perfectly normal one minute, and then something pulls their pin and after a brief period of calm…one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand…BOOM! They explode at 360 degrees all over the place. They’ll talk about anything and everything and none of it makes sense. Everybody loses it sometimes and it turns out that when people lose it, it’s often because they feel under-appreciated.

Bottom line is: if you don’t want people losing it around you, you should show a little appreciation. My mom used to say, ”You can always appreciate something about somebody. You can appreciate them for coming. You can appreciate them for going. There’s always something to appreciate.”

THINK THEY KNOW IT ALL & DO KNOW IT ALL –  TWO DIFFERENT TYPES

Then there’s the “Think They Know it All” and the “Know it All”. They’re different. The know it all actually knows 98% of something and they’d be happy to tell you about it for hours on end but they don’t have a moment to listen to your clearly inferior ideas. Then you have the think they know it all and they might know maybe 2% of what they think they know but they think “hey that’s pretty good”.

So these are two very different behaviors and they require two very different responses.

We say with know it alls, the best thing to do is to turn them into a mentor or run your ideas by them in the form of questions because, since they’re know it alls, they have to know the answers to your questions. If your idea is a good one, they’ll hear it as they think it and they may even think they thought up your question themselves and then answer it. We always say, “Present the question in a document that’s been notarized if you’re really paranoid about it.”

With the think they know it alls, you want to put their bad ideas to the hook but you don’t want them to be on the defensive because the problem is: with a person who doesn’t know very much about something, if you press them about what they don’t know, then they’re forced to repeat it and every time those words come out their mouth, they go back into both of their ears and they think that it must be right since they heard it twice.

THE WHINER

You’ve got the whiner. That’s the person with:

“Everything’s wrong, nothing’s right. There’s a plan for my life and I’m not in it.

THE “NO” PERSON

Then you’ve got the “No” person who’s sort of the fossilized whiner. That’s the person who shoots down every idea:

“That won’t work. Nothing works. Never has. Never will.”

What we say with negative people is that you’ve got to let them be negative.

One of the dumbest things you can do is try to talk a negative person into being positive. In fact, if you ever tried that, it’d probably turn you into a negative person too. So, in a way, you’ve got what you wanted because we all know that two negatives make a positive.

Don’t waste time trying to make a negative person positive.

Try to find out the details of what they’re negative about. With the “No” person, it may take awhile. With the whiner, it may take even longer. So, you have to keep asking the question a few times and repeating it. Keep saying “Well actually the question is…” until eventually they say, “OK” and they tell you the details and then finally if you find somebody that’s got a talent for finding what’s wrong, one simple thing to do is put them in charge of finding what’s wrong.

Hear Dr. Rick Kirschner’s  entire response on Expert Access Radio.

Courtesy – Expert Access