with people with good skills to defuse a tense situation at the workplace I mean everyone of you, because I suck at this and I’m sure anyone here is better than I am with this kind of stuff.
Tense situation is a karen yelling at one of my colleagues because her father’s operation was postponed because I kid you not 4 doctors called in sick today. Rumor has it they’re striking for better pay.
My instinctive response if someone starts behaving like a childish, snippy, entitled karen and acts passive-aggressively is to leave and ignore the person. In this case, the karen started ranting to my coworker, getting all snippy and wouldn’t shut up. A rational conversation with people that irrational is impossible, so I kept doing my job, transferring a patient to another ward.
I never expected this colleague to tell me she felt let down because I didn’t help her to deal with said karen. She said simply staying next to her would have sufficed. I told her I’d do that next time someone yells at her.
I consider myself lucky because I can leave to do my job but my colleague was trapped with this person.
My questions to you people with good social skills:
does it really help to simply stay next to my colleague, letting her do the talking while I do nothing but looking at the karen in the eye?
what if, each time the karen opens her mouth I repeat ‘calm down’ ad nauseam till she either tires, shuts up or walks away?
what do you say or do to support your coworkers while they’re being verbally abused that somewhat defuses the situation?
what if avoiding conflict is a trait of mine to the point that I let people walk all over me?
how do you resist the urge to walk away? Situations like this trigger my fight or flight response.
what if I have to do this with a man and it gets physical? If somebody strikes me and I strike back, and I can guarantee you I’m striking back, I’m as guilty as the first aggressor.
Understand the underlying currents, & when you can concentrate on them, then the details are much less stressing…
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_logan_tribal_leadership
That is the too-short intro to Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright’s important book “Tribal Leadership”.
They realized that people are always in 1 of 5 cultural-processes/modes.
( I’m mixing-in stuff from “John Braddock”'s trilogy, his “A Spy’s Guide to Strategy”, so you get the leverage of both, without having to read all Braddock’s stuff: Braddock’s the one who realized it’s all on 3 categories of “game”, Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright didn’t realize that, but they did identify the 5 cultures, what their programmed-reactions are, & how to get someone up from 1 to the next, using what leverage )
You have to understand the nature of the culture you’re working-in and the nature of the individual you’re working with.
Staying near someone works if that’s helpful for them, it can worsen things, for people who need to be left alone. Simply ask them!
Avoiding-conflict is a characteristic of Kegan3 unconscious-mind development: wanting to be liked… Kegan & Lahey’s book “Immunity to Change” is on the unconscious-mind development stages, & our unconscious-mind’s mechanism of sabotaging our growing-up process, in order to protect the status-quo dysfunction.
I’m requesting that you read 4 books, & hopefully they will sooo profoundly open your eyes to underlying-context-currents, that you’ll have massive improvement in your understanding of what’s really causing problems…
“Tribal Leadership”, already identified, you need that one in you, please earn its meanings…
“Immunity to Change” by Kegan & Lahey
“Lead Right for Your Company’s Type” by Schneider: most companies are doing the wrong mode of work, for their actual-domain, or actual-customer, & it sabotages the workplace, the culture, the customer-relationship, etc…
Grab a blank sheet of paper, & divide it into a 2x2 matrix:
top-half is Potential, bottom-half is Actuality.
Left-side is People, right-side is Tasks.
Kindergarten, infirmary, learning, growing, all go in the top-left quadrant.
Science, discovery, research, driven-excellence-engineering, all go in the top-right.
Bottom-left is consulting, urban-planning, journalism, courts, etc…
Bottom-right is 6-Sigma, manufacturing, etc…
Every 1 of those quadrants has specific requirements and practices that must be got right, xor the operation is sabotaging itself & damn-near nobody knows about this stuff.
Schneider gave an example for each quadrant, & showed how doing-it-right differs from doing-it-wrong. He identified which management-practices are appropriate in each quadrant.
He did do his book with the 2x2 Matrix upside-down, however, with pie-in-the-sky potential on the bottom, & the concrete up top…
but once one flips it upright, then it’s much more natural & intuitive.
Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”
That is THE book to understand what’s actually going-on, worldwide, among our species: There are 2 thinking-systems: the imprint->reaction system, that is the automatic system it is the ideological-system, it is the prejudice-system, it is the trained expertise system, & the considered-reasoning system.
The imprint->reaction system apparently is bottom forebrain ( “Top Brain / Bottom Brain” book matches this stuff, therefore I assume it’s describing the same thing, as “mere coincidence” looks too improbable ), & considered-reasoning is top forebrain.
Right now, the imprint->reaction system’s culture is trying to break/shatter/eradicate considered-reasoning from the world, so that it can have its imprint->reaction rampaging, & settle everything that way ( ideologically, or “religiously”, or animal-reactions, whichever terminology you prefer )
THAT is the real underlying war.
Leninism warred against considered-reasoning through “education”, the Republicans have eradicated considered-reasoning from education as much as they can: it isn’t that left or right hates considered-reasoning, it is that the imprint->reaction mechanism hates it.
So, all the “ideologies” and “prejudices” and “religions” of the world are fighting to beat/break/obliterate the single threat that they all fear: considered-reasoning.
Knowing that, when toxic people in a workplace are bullying to establish their pack-dominion, IF one can see what’s underlying their ideology’s trappings, if one can see what it is that their ideology is fearing, THEN one can be in a stronger position to manage this conflict, right?
Oh, & Kegan’s stages…
Kegan3 is absorbing experience, Kegan4 is pushing-out meaning that contradicts one’s chosen identity, I call Kegan4 “Bulling-BOSS mode”, & it is central to male-culture’s identity, & Kegan5 is systems-of-systems mode.
He doesn’t call them by those names, but there are simply sooo many different psychological-dimensions to keep straight, that I use indexing, now: Kahneman1 for imprint->reaction lower-forebrain system, Kahneman2 for the considered-reasoning upper-forebrain system, etc.
Each of these 4 is profound, & each will give you some leverage, but it is the weaving them together in one’s own life, that makes them into magic, I think…
I wish you well, I wish people didn’t have to experience the kind of stuff you’re caught-in, & in my view, only the profound & permanent fixes are worth investing-in: the ones that liberate one’s entire-life from that kind of helplessness/suffering.
Here’s a bonus psychology book: Elisabeth Haich’s “The Wisdom of the Tarot”, … unfortunate title, from our culture’s perspective, but the MOST profound psychology book on the archetype stages of human sentience that I’ve ever encountered.
The physical book has the illustrations of the archetype-states, the ebook doesn’t.
In my life, the “lightning-struck tower” state is always followed by the "dwelling in the lake of memories, while attractive-memories try to swerve one from one’s path ( represented by the dog ) & threatening-memories do too ( the wolf ).
KNOWING that, the last-time was much easier for me to deal-with quickly & efficiently.
It’s life-liberating, knowing what’s going-on in one’s life-meaning!
Anyways, those 5 are all profound, all important, all pertinent, & all contribute to one’s getting up into the “next level” of development.
Do well, & relentlessly be loyal to your LivingPotential & your LivingOpportunity/future, ok?
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