Leadership - Interview with Bob Dignen

welcome bob. Tell us what do people normally mean when they say that a colleague or boss or employee is difficult. Okay, well, to answer that, let me put on my coach hat because that's where I spend a lot of time listening to people who tell me about other people who are difficult. And I have to say when you hear that description of others is difficult. It's really not clear. You have to keep an open mind. You know, the coach, he may be telling me genuinely about people who are in some way difficult to handle difficult for different reasons. They're rude, they're offensive or maybe they're nice people, but they just don't deliver on time. They talk too much in meetings, they don't talk enough in meetings, all that kind of stuff. I've heard a lot of different complaints from people about other people. And yes, you have to admit some people are challenging to be around, but there's a big but here when people say others are difficult, I always think that fundamentally they're not describing other people fundamentally. They're describing more about themselves, their needs, their values, which this other person is somehow ignoring and triggering a negative emotion and then this person gets labeled as a problem as difficult when in fact, and I think this is the key thing. If the person complaining had the communication or leadership skills to handle the situation to handle the person, if they had more tolerance not to just label another person is difficult, then there might not be any difficulty at all. What can we do to improve the way we work with those? We see as difficult. Yeah, well that's the million dollar question and of course all of this is so situational. It's very difficult to give specific answers which are going to apply in specific situations. So if we talk about general solutions, I think two fundamental approaches to stand out. Firstly, we need to start with acceptance. Stop labeling people as difficult. Stop asking the other person to change to my way of doing things. You engage with their way, learn from it. Practice what we say. We believe about diversity, that it's good that we all need to live are different selves and we all need to engage with our different cells. This is ultimately a kind of flexibility. So that's one thing that as we complain about others is difficult. I think it signals we stopped being flexible. Alternatively, you just have a conversation about your rules of engagement. How shall we do things together? What is good behavior for us? How do we do meetings? How do we write emails? How good is the quality we deliver? Build a common culture. So for me, I don't complain about other people. Don't label them as difficult. Either look at yourself and try to grow your level of acceptance or talk to the other person and co create a reality which you could both live together. Those are the first two areas I explore with clients are there situations in which we need to take a stricter approach with difficult people. I mean, absolutely. I think there are many situations where it is actually totally justified to become intolerant and to insist on certain forms of non negotiable behavior. For example, if it's health and safety related zero tolerance, you cannot allow people to risk the health and safety of others. So you see this a lot in construction and in the energy sector. Legal and financial compliance rules also demand total followership non disclosure agreements will put directors in jail if they reveal sensitive market information and even less serious behavior. The ones we might see in our own teams constantly submitting work below standard, constantly being slow to collaborate undermining colleagues with gossip. I think it's extremely important from a leadership perspective to deal very firmly with these behaviors early and openly as an overt non acceptance of that behavior because if you tolerate it, you're basically on the route to toxic team. Finally, a personal question, what sort of people do you find it most difficult to work with? It's always interesting when you apply this to yourself and to be honest thinking about it. It's not static. It's changed over time, which probably means that I've changed over time to because in my younger days, I think I was very sensitive to individuals who are very task oriented, very demanding of themselves, very critical of others. They were kind of scary people to work with very scary if there were customers and you had to please them. So, over time, however, I actually got to really like this kind of demanding person in the end, I saw that they didn't want to be critical of me, they just wanted to improve themselves in their situation and actually this kind of focus person is relatively easy to work with, the people who are toughest now, I think are the what I would call highly independent and the highly unfocused people, people who don't quite have a clear vision of what they want to achieve, and people who don't quite know how to get to what they want to achieve, but who don't respond well to structure or efforts to bring clarity because they feel they can do it themselves. So this is a tough nut to crack their fuzzy, they're independent, but they don't take advice well because they like to be fuzzy and they want to be independent. So, collaborating with this kind of individual, I still struggle because I believe a lot in collaboration, I believe a lot in clarifying what we should do together. This is almost now a value for me, having worked with it for so many years. So, individuals who don't buy into that, yep, I still struggle with them, thanks very much bob, We look forward to talking to you again next time. Thank you very much