Wow, wow, wow! I was throwing out some of the useless stuff on my desk in anticipation of our move to the Alhambra office and look what I found — an article I saved from the January 18th issue of The New York Times. It’s about the difficult people we have to deal with every day both at home and in the office.
The article breaks difficult personalities into 7 basic categories: Indecisives, Know-It-All Experts, Super-Agreeables, Complainers, Silent and Unresponsives, Hostile-Aggressives and Negativists . . . and goes on to explain that difficult people are not harmless. The Times quotes one management consultant as saying: “The impact of slowing productivity or creating unhappy customers is immeasurable, unknowable and often a company’s biggest cost.”
Experts agree that we need to find a way to communicate with these people because they’re not going away. Psychologists say people exhibit difficult behavior because they have a need that’s not being met. The article presents a very clear message: In the end, we cannot control other people, only our response to them.
I thought about this many times after I read it and even brought the article to the office to show the other Muses. Yes, it was interesting reading and it spawned a couple of knowing laughs, but the honest truth is that on any given day I can easily morph into an ugly personality that fits snugly within one of the 7 categories listed above. On those days the jerk I’m forced to deal with is me.
Somewhere — not in the Times article — I read that if I’m not part of the solution, I’m part of the problem. I guess I have a lot of work to do and it’s not all about making ads look good, either.
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