Engagement. Lee G. Bolman

and a boss from hell. All that Vicky faces could be a recipe for failure; but she is smart, savvy, patient, and courageous. The story allows you to watch Vicky at work, see how she thinks and uses advice from others, and explore the impact of what she does and says. Our leadership tale also provides specific examples of how each of the SURE principles can be successfully applied across a range of relationship difficulties and everyday managerial challenges. The book is organized to go back and forth between Vicky's story and Interludes that illuminate key lessons as you go along. An Epilogue summarizes the model.

      We have not forgotten the request from our readers, clients, and students for skill building help and guidance. That's where the Skills of Engagement Tutorial at the end of the book comes in. It offers a deeper dive into the foundational interpersonal skills at the heart of the SURE model, along with selected references and resources for further study, and suggested exercises and activities to strengthen your people skills.

      Read, enjoy, and learn! Ask others to join you in your study. Develop support groups to sustain you in challenging times. Learning to work more effectively with difficult people is a set of skills that every manager needs for success. May this volume be a source of wisdom, skill building, and strength in all you do.

      INTRODUCTION

      THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 3 TELLS of a sailor who bears the curse of an albatross – a giant seabird – wrapped around his neck. He escapes this burden only when he becomes more open to the world and himself. When you find yourself at wit's end looking for some way to cope with a difficult person in your life, you've met your albatross. Like the mariner, cursing the bird or bending under its weight will only keep you adrift. The way out begins with engagement: finding ways to see more (and more clearly), identify new possibilities, and appreciate the benefits – even the beauty – in learning to navigate the rough waters. This deep engagement is sustained by a commitment to sort out all you face, and confidence that you've got what it takes to reach a safe harbor.

      This book will help you develop the skills and strategies you need to cope with difficult relationships. Think about how you currently deal with the unusually prickly, taxing, or toxic folks who block progress, undermine your confidence, leave chaos in their wake, and cause a disproportionate share of headaches and sleepless nights. Like black holes, these difficult people suck up too much time and energy as you (and often others) struggle to live and work productively with them. They might come in the form of a problem employee, bully boss, chronically complaining coworker, mean-spirited associate, Machiavellian teammate, or troubled colleague. We all have stories to tell that end badly because we find ourselves at our worst in dealing with those who give us the hardest time. How well did you handle the last person who drove you up a wall? Did you achieve what you hoped? Did the relationship get better or worse? Were you able to alter behaviors that were destructive to individuals and to the organizations or projects that you love? If the outcomes were disappointing, this book is for you. It will show you how to engage your albatross productively and confidently.

      The book advocates that deeply engaging self, other, and the situation is the best route to transform difficult relationships. It draws from two basic premises:

      1. People always have more options for handling difficult situations than they recognize.

      2. The stress and frustration in difficult relationships limit the ability to see and appreciate better possibilities.

      Engagement leads to choices beyond fight or flight! It is always challenging, but deep engagement gets easier when you have a workable framework to guide you.

      The book is built around a simple parable that illustrates four basic rules of engagement for staying alert, grounded, and productive in the face of difficult relationships. The story is a universal tale about life in an organization for a new manager who has inherited a group of challenging coworkers and a situation in need of a turnaround. We'd all like to live and work with perfect people, but reality doesn't always deliver our work or life mates to order. We need to cope – and thrive – with the demands of the different relationships and interpersonal styles that come our way. Difficult people are costly to organizations and toxic to those around them, and undoing their negative impact can deliver more value than hiring a superstar performer.4 Handling difficult people takes a combination of strategy, confidence, determination, and skill. This book offers ways to enhance competencies in each of these key areas.

      It tells the story of a seasoned manager, Vicky, as she copes with the cast of difficult characters she finds in her new job, seeks ways to do the work she's been hired to do, and enlists the support of her mentor and former boss, Peter. Vicky's choices and Peter's suggestions illustrate best practices and the skills needed to implement them. Interludes periodically punctuate the story to encourage reflection and underscore key lessons for putting the four rules of engagement into practice. We close the book with a Skills of Engagement Tutorial section for those who want more how-to instruction on challenging fundamentals like skilled candor, mobilizing healthy support, giving and receiving feedback, testing, high quality inquiry, generating options under duress, and enhancing resilience.

      Our story is set in a workplace, but you can apply its teachings wherever you need them. At its core, solving difficult people problems involves an informed approach for knowing when and how to fix or fold —invest in making things better or recognize it is time for someone to move on. This book shows you how.

      Our approach is different from many other how-to books on the topic that ask readers to become amateur psychologists in order to diagnose which syndrome or psychopathology they are encountering in a boss or coworker. Is s/he a paranoid or an obsessive-compulsive? A narcissist or a histrionic? An exploder or a staller? A sniper or a know-it-all? We see several problems with that way of framing the issue.

      It can lead you to make superficial or wrong judgments about troublesome people, labeling them instead of doing real diagnostic work about the full situation. Second, that approach typically leads to a diagnosis that cannot be shared. If you believe that someone is, say, a paranoid, you will likely keep that diagnosis to yourself, so it becomes undiscussable and untestable. Finally, that way of framing the issue reinforces the comfortable assumption that problems lie in something wrong with someone else. That makes it easy to feel, “I'm OK and don't need to change; I just need to find a way to shape up the other.” That path leads to frustration and disappointment more often than not.

      Following Harry Stack Sullivan's argument that personality manifests itself only in interpersonal relationships,5 we believe it is more fruitful to see people problems as embedded in social interactions. That changes the question from “how do I change the other person?” to “how can I change what I do or understand in hope of improving our relationship?” Our approach focuses on a compact set of guidelines designed to produce learning and improvement across a broad range of dysfunctional relationships.

      Sure Rules of Engagement

      We have built the book around four rules for fixing bad situations captured in the acronym SURE. The rules are laid out to be easy to remember – a requirement for useful knowledge. They are also deep and broad enough to provide helpful guidance for most of the difficult people problems you're likely to encounter. All are grounded in research and best practices so we know that, when applied skillfully, they work. We introduce the rules in this introduction. In later sections, we delve deeper into each and show how to use them skillfully to handle specific workplace challenges such as managing your boss, coping with bullies, learning with tenacity, or leading a diverse team. We return to probe and further explore basic building blocks of the rules in our Skills of Engagement Tutorial in the book's final section.

1. Stop, Look, and Learn

      A first step in tackling difficult people problems is to stop and identify ways to harness your strongest problem-solving self. That means quieting the inner emotional turmoil and unproductive restlessness6 that naturally arise in challenging or stressful situations. Neuroscience reminds us that the human mind naturally defaults

3

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (The Poetry Foundation, 1834). www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173253. Accessed October 4, 2015.

4

Michael Housman and Dylan Minor, Toxic Workers (HBS working paper 16–057, November 2015) (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2015). The authors studied more than 50,000 workers across 11 different firms and concluded that toxic workers are expensive and destructive. Their impact runs the gamut from potential legal or regulatory costs for a company to more local impact, such as declining unit and organizational morale, damage to a firm's reputation, and driving others to leave the organization faster and more frequently, thereby increasing training and turnover costs, and loss of vital institutional history and experience.

5

Harry Stack Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: Norton, 1953.

6

Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” Science 330, no. 6006 (November 12, 2010): 932. [DOI:10.1126/science.1192439].