Professional Dysfunction

I’ve been aware for some time now that what causes my clients the most pain in their professional lives is not the weight of their responsibilities, the heavier workload due to the economic downturn.

What leads to frustration, sometimes despair, are those difficult or even hostile exchanges with specific people in the work environment, often the boss. These interactions play out in predictable patterns which one of my clients recently described in great detail.

The scene was all-too-familiar: her boss kept calling her again and again, each time with a new demand, neither asking nor caring how the interruption would affect what she was currently working on, expecting her to be able to shift gears immediately, insisting that everything was urgent. It was making her numb.

Where there is professional dysfunction (and it abounds), we are incapable of changing the other person, but we can change our part in the dance.

While it wasn’t hard for her to see what was happening or how it was affecting her, she was at a loss as to know what to do about it. She felt stuck in a situation that was sapping her motivation, energy and confidence, and she could see only two possibilities, to continue to suffer or to resign, both of them unacceptable. The conflict had become about her, the victim, and her boss, the victimizer, and there was no place to go except down a slippery slope or out the door. No wonder she felt paralyzed!

But what if her situation was actually not black-and-white, but gray, and there was a middle ground?

What if, as hard as it might be for her to admit, both parties had a part in creating it?

What if instead of seeing herself and the difficult person as solo performers who periodically collided, she could realize that the two of them were actually dance partners who hadn’t yet learned how not to step on each other’s toes?

If she could begin to see the painful interpersonal situation not as something that was being being perpetrated on her but as an opportunity to claim more freedom of movement, leadership authority and self-respect, a whole new world would open up to her.

This is this cornerstone of the work I do with clients.

I began by having her move back from the brink of reacting habitually, e.g., bitching to others, but not confronting the situation directly, or wallowing in regret and self-recrimination.

Reacting to a situation blocks out possibilities, and if she could stop doing it, she would find that she had more choices than she could have ever imagined. She could then create and execute a reasoned response which preserved her position, values and dignity.

In telling me about how her boss would constantly bombard her with new priorities, all of them having to be done yesterday, she admitted, “I know what’s coming as soon as I see the caller ID on the telephone display.”

I suggested she might use this information for her own benefit and protection by asking herself, “Can I handle a call from this person right now? Am I up to it?” If the answer was no, the solution was simple: don’t take the call.

We also discussed her tendency to take it all on and how she could ask early on in the conversation whether the new task being laid on her was to take precedence over the one she was currently engaged in and point out that a consequence of switching gears abruptly would be that it would take more time to restart.

As she began to see how she could exercise choice over when she allowed herself to be interrupted, and to shift the decision-making responsibility to her boss where it belonged, she took back leadership over herself.

Where there is professional dysfunction (and it abounds), we are incapable of changing the other person, but we can change our part in the dance.

When we can get beyond feeling beat up, badgered and bullied, and respond from a place of knowing who we are and the value we bring, we make our professional lives healthier, one incident at a time.