Hi Zena, Members of my team have been shouted at by angry customers recently. It’s nothing they’ve done wrong; these people just seem to think they can take out their bad mood on us. We are well trained, but some people have been upset over it. I’ve given them advice on how to rise above it, but it doesn’t seem to help ‘ |
| Thanks to AC, in the insurance industry, for this email over the holidays. It seems to be an increasingly angry world and I’m hearing stories like this far too frequently. Research by Professor Christine Porath at Georgetown University found that 98% of people experience ‘incivility’ at work to some degree. This can be micro aggressions like snide or sarcastic emails, to disrespectful conversations, to full-on threats of violence or worse. Unfortunately, anyone dealing with members of the public will experience something. Even my local bookshop owner has been shouted at recently. There is no excuse for any type of abuse. Most of us can handle it, up to a point. The stress bucket model explains our different levels of tolerance. We all carry different loads of stress at different times. An event that we find very stressful might not even register on someone else’s radar. However, resilience fluctuates. When we are struggling with life stresses such as family or relationship problems, financial worries, or illness, one extra stressor can tip us over the edge. The World Health Organisation reports that one in seven children between the ages of ten to nineteen experiences a mental health disorder. Their normally resilient parents may have no coping mechanism left to deal with arseholes at work. Managers need to be sensitive to these vulnerabilities and not surprised by an uncharacteristic reaction. Here’s my thoughts on how to support an upset colleague: 1. Get to know the person behind the mask How well do you know your team – the real people behind the professional work face? What’s really going on in their lives, who might bring this stuff home with them and allow it to fester? We are all messy humans, not robots: we bring our past experiences to work and these shape our current relationships. I don’t mean that we should all Share Our Truth like an episode of Oprah. We just need to find more time to get to know each other. What are the events in people’s backstory or private life that might be behind their emotional response to bad behaviour? People vary in their attitude to authority figures for example. An aggressive person can bring up uncomfortable memories. Someone with a more secure base may find it easier to shake off an unpleasant encounter and move on. Don’t assume you know, spend more time with them and find out. 2. Listen to how they feel and don’t try to fix them. You and I are paid to solve business problems, but emotional problems don’t need fixing. The person just wants an empathetic ear, not a solution. Your 2025 mantra is: feel it, don’t fix it. When your system goes down, you need a solution. You don’t need to discuss how you feel about it. When you have a people problem, you absolutely want to unpack it and discuss how it makes you feel. Perhaps not immediately, but once you’ve had time to recharge. You don’t want advice or fixing, just space to think. Think about your last bad day. Did you want to talk about it, or did you want someone to tell you how they would have handled it better? If someone hasn’t taken your advice, it’s probably because they didn’t want it. Listening properly is hard. Crazy busyness has crowded out conversations. Here’s some tips for dealing with emotional situations: Do Tell them that you’ve noticed what happened to them and that you want to make sure they are OK. Ask them how they are feeling about what happened. Get them to open up by using coaching skills: the reflecting, clarifying and summarising skills on the listening wheel. Arrange to talk later if you don’t have enough time to give them your undivided attention now. Give them space to unpack what happened and come up with their own reflections. Get comfortable with silence. There is no need to fill in the gap. Offer advice only if it would be negligent not to. Don’t Expect them to trust you if you’ve never really listened to them before. They’ll think you are just ticking boxes, so you might need to ask how they are on a few occasions to build up trust. Overstep their boundaries by digging for emotions that they aren’t ready to talk about. They are under no obligation to share their thoughts with you. Dispute their version of events, like gushing ‘that’s ridiculous, of course you are amazing at what you do’. They won’t believe you and it’s not helpful to have people deny your feelings. Challenge a negative mindset gently, with facts: ‘how many times have you done the same task with excellent feedback?’ Bring it back to you. ‘You think you’ve got problems?! Let me tell you what I have to deal with.’ I’d be delighted to lead a workshop for you on how to manage your people problems. We all have them. There’s more real examples of problem personalities and how to cope with them in my spanking new book, Badly Behaved People. |