Working with Difficult Personalities E-Book

50MINUTES

• Herausgeber: 50Minutes.com
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Coaching pro
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 30

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Ready to take your career to the next level? Find out everything you need to know about working with difficult personalities with this practical guide.

We will all encounter difficult personalities at some point in our careers. Particularly challenging colleagues can sap our motivation, undermine our effectiveness and leave us feeling angry and frustrated. However, you do not have to simply put up with this: there are a range of straightforward steps you can take to ward off conflict and improve your relationships with the people around you. 

In 50 minutes you will be able to:
• Find out what causes conflicts in your relationships at work
• Understand the key characteristics of a range of difficult personalities
• Implement strategies to deal with unreasonable behaviour in the workplace

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Leseprobe

Working with difficult personalities

Problem: we all encounter tension and conflicts from time to time throughout our careers. How can we deal with difficult personalities so that they do not throw us off balance and we can continue with what we are doing?Uses: knowing how to analyse the situation and react constructively when, for example, your supervisor is behaving like a tyrant, a coworker is poisoning the atmosphere within the team or a colleague is oversharing about their anxiety can have a major impact on your professional relationships. Professional context: interpersonal relationships at work. FAQs:Why do conflicts arise?Is conflict inevitable?Do I have to make concessions?Is it ever a good idea to get angry at work?Why does a particular colleague behave differently when it is just the two of us compared to when we are in a group?Why are there high and low points in my relationships with colleagues?Why do I always end up working with difficult colleagues?Why do I never get on with my supervisors?Is it possible to change people?

Interpersonal relationships are not easy and we come across people we struggle to get on with every day. Unfortunately, while we cannot choose our colleagues, we are still forced to spend large amounts of time with them at work.

Our relationships with some people are naturally easy, harmonious and constructive, which means that they do not require any particular effort. Conversely, we need to work at our relationships with more difficult people. Accepting that this effort is necessary is a crucial first step. You may be asking yourself why you need to put time and energy into this relationship when the other person is the problem. This is a reasonable question, but as Gandhi famously said, you must “be the change you want to see in the world”: if you want change, you have to be the one to make this change happen, and the same goes for the world of work! If you are aiming to get out of one or more toxic relationships, it is up to you to take control of the situation and give yourself the opportunity to change it.

This guide will give you a practical three-step programme which will allow you to see the situation more clearly, put things in perspective and take action instead of just putting up with it.

Handling difficult personalities: the basics

Step one: knowing who you are dealing with

How can you say that a person has a difficult personality? It is not easy to draw a line between a tendency to get angry a little too easily and a personality disorder, or between occasional mood swings and genuine psychological problems.

To make things easier, we can use the definition provided by the French psychiatrist and psychotherapist Christophe André (born in 1956). According to André, difficult personalities are characterised by “certain character traits which are excessively pronounced or fixed”, with the result that people with these personality types “inflict suffering on themselves and others” (2000: 20). If a colleague seems to consistently behave unusually for an extended period of time, with negative effects on the effectiveness and wellbeing of either you or your team, it is probably fair to conclude that you are dealing with a difficult personality.