Teams Work – does yours?

My most popular workshop “Difficult People Made Easy” demonstrates time and again how hard we find dealing with each other, particularly when the pressure is on.

There’s tons of advice and everyone’s an expert when it comes to solving other people’s problems, but when that red mist has fallen and your teeth are grinding, it’s a lot harder to be logical and detached about that IDIOT and their outrageous behaviour.

I’m one of the lucky ones; I don’t work in an open plan office, listening to the same old gripes and whinges every day, I don’t have to sit through endless meetings with the same people, hearing the same thing and knowing nothing will change.  But I do hear a lot of complaints about colleagues and bosses and I know that each one of those is having  a serious impact on happiness and productivity at work.

The truth is, a really strong team with multiple strengths, breadth of experience and diverse views is essential for most organisations. But that brings with it all the challenges of different “right” ways of doing things.

Since when did we all become so judgemental of each other, and so convinced that our feelings our everyone else’s top priority?  Maybe our acquisitive society has made us more self-obsessed and less open to differences of opinion, because it’s these differences that are most often the cause of “difficult people” type problems.

I prescribe a collective, communal deep breath.  We don’t have to like everyone we work with, but we do need to work with them, so it’s probably best to find that happy place where we accept difference and discard our preconceptions and prejudice.

Years ago I heard a great saying: “Anger is a poison that you swallow, hoping it will kill someone else”.