Working With Difficult People

have you ever worked with a difficult person? If you’re a human being and you’re on the same Planet as I am yes you have difficult people present themselves quite frequently and I want to talk about pulling them into the same sphere of safety that you need to be in so that people can work together as teams the team scenario that I’m often in is I’m coaching a sales team for a sales pitch and interview orals presentation sales pitch whatever you want to call it and we got to get everybody on the same page when I go into meetings I start with a very friendly positive attitude I believe that everyone is awesome and everybody’s valid and I keep my feelers out for the difficult person and they’re pretty easy to spot because they tend to invalidate others they’re overly assertive they bring an aggressive energy that will shut people down and suddenly you’ll notice that people aren’t sharing their ideas as much because they don’t feel like getting stopped on well I just found my difficult person I also just look for people who have just seemingly more power than anyone else in the room for whatever reason maybe they’re the owner or the owner’s uh relative uh maybe they have a high rank it doesn’t matter some people have a pre per received rank whoever they are watch for them and I watch to see what effect they’re having on others and I listen internally to see if I feel a little bit shut down because I you know I’m vulnerable to all this stuff too and what I do is when I spot the vulnerability of somebody in the team or I spot the over assertive or the difficult person I affirm them I’m not going to affirm them on what shouldn’t be affirmed I’m going to affirm them on what’s right about what they have to say they might be a little off putting but there’s something right in there there always is and I’m looking for that and I’m going to grab it and verbally to the team I’m going to affirm that so that they see I represent them well step one in winning over a difficult person is to communicate and demonstrate that you will represent them well even if they disagree with you pretty soon they’re not as scared of you they don’t feel as threatened by you because you keep reinforcing an aspect of what they said now at a point you can then also so take them to the mat you can point out what’s not right in the process of having pointed out what is right about what they say or what’s more likely the case is they just shut down someone else they invalidated somebody so what you do is you go in as the protector of the person who was just invalidated you say hang on a second I want to reinforce something you said to the positive now I want to talk about what they said and I’m either going to take them to the math to either point out that you know they shouldn’t be shutting that person down that their idea is valid or better I’m going to connect their what’s right about their perspective into what’s right about the other person’s the goal is to create a a place where you’re putting together the various good ideas into one place that’s the reason you have a team right otherwise you just do what the one person says then you have a dictatorship or just a one person show so you affirm them you show them that you will always make them look good and that gives you the right to have some critique and then you defend hopefully somewhat invisibly the other people in the room by affirming for them if they need affirmation they just got shut down I’m going to affirm them that’s awesome now this is really important now it may seem like it clashes it doesn’t clash I’m going to make the connection between their idea and my idea and the other person’s idea so simply put the way I work with difficult people but is by affirming them protecting their ego demonstrating that I will make them look good to the group and then in affirming them I can then also counter them and third I watch for others who are shut down or made to feel vulnerable by the difficult person and I protect them at my own expense sometimes I’m going to go out on a limb and be the one to protect whoever was vulnerable with the goal of connecting the dots between their ideas the part of them that are good the other person’s ideas the part of them that are good and my own ideas the part of them that are good because that’s what we’re trying to do so difficult people are actually just vulnerable people they’re defending themselves and their own fragility by going on the offensive so hey take care of them too and you can take the difficult person and make them easier.