9: Participant Profile
The author looks to customer service as a model for interacting with your boss at work, as this is essentially the relationship: as an employee, you are a vendor selling your labor to a customer who is finicky and unclear about his needs and desires. In the customer service profession, representatives are trained to deal with customers who are petulant, nasty, and rude - because in the end, they provide revenue to the company.
Representatives are also trained to work quickly to get to the root cause of the complaint - every minute spent on a difficult customer is an expense that is weighed against the revenue the company gets from retaining their business, so their goal is to resolve the complaint in the least amount of time possible so that the account will remain profitable.
(EN: Which brings to mind an interesting notion of "firing the customer." When companies find that serving a given customer is not profitable, because the amount of time devoted to a customer's constant complaints is an expense that exceeds the profit from the sale, it makes no sense to continue to serve that customer.)
The same approach for dealing with problem customers can be applied to dealing with problem bosses: you have to remove the dysfunctional emotional "stuff" and get to the heart of the issue: understand what their expectation is, and determine a method by which you can meet it. Some diplomacy is necessary to defuse and dismiss the emotional overtones, but ultimately, a participant focuses on action.
This returns the author to the notion of the participant mindset: the participant doesn't merely absorb abuse, but seeks to play a proactive role in determining an effective solution.
And, of course, this is best done systematically, though a process, rather than by improvisation and trial-and-error.
The System
Based on his observations of the retail industry, the author has developed a five-point approach to dealing with difficult people in a business environment:
- Grounding - Be aware of and attempt to minimize your own emotional reaction to negative behavior. Unless this is done, nothing else will be possible.
- Reframing - Focus the discussion on the issues and seek to define the parameters of a solution. An effective way to do this is to rephrase what the other person has said, stripping away the emotional triggers, and asking if you correctly understand what they're getting at.
- Acknowledging - Validating the other person's point of view gives them a clear sense that you understand and are seeking to serve their interests. The shift from "I" and "you" to "we" occurs in this phase.
- Consensus - Negotiate toward an statement of agreement that is explicit and precise so that each party understands what the other expects in future.
- Execution - Once an agreement is made, be clear about accountability, responsibility, and follow-on actions from both parties. Then, simply do what you have committed to do, and hold the other party to their own commitments.
(EN: The acronym is obviously, but as the author has appended a copyright symbol, I feel it's better to avoid using it at all.)
The System in Action
The author provides a protracted example of a conversation in which the principles above are put into action.
(EN: The example introduces nothing new, is not very illustrative, and is heavily rigged to "prove" the value of the system. My sense is it's merely an attempt to add content to build a chapter out of a few sentences worth of content, and I'm cutting the fluff.)
Exercise: Pre-Engagement Checklist
The author presents an exercise to enable a person to mentally prepare themselves for a conversation with a hostile party. This involves reflecting on past exchanges to discover problem areas to be aware of and mitigate in the upcoming conversation.
One part of the checklist lists the behaviors you expect from the other party - things they have done in the past and are expected to do again in future, along with some ideas of how you can react to minimize the damage and distraction caused by their tactics.
Another part of the checklist focuses on yourself, on the actions you have undertaken to trigger the negative behaviors in the first list, so that you can work to avoid them, then the actions you can take to minimize damage when you are unable to avoid them and must simply react to them in a calm and composed manner.