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Humble and helpful
A while back, a good friend of mine from college was asked to transfer to a different department because she didn't quite get along with her boss.She described her boss as "stupid, lazy and always taking credit for her work."My other friend, Sarah, recently was asked to leave the company immediately after the CEO found someone to replace her. She was hired by the prestigious private equity firm that owns the company to "assist CEO with daily operation." From very early on, Sarah told me stories of how "unprofessional" her CEO was,and how he had a strong favoritism towards his own people, who were just as incompetent as the CEO. Just last week, one of our senior designers resigned without saying goodbye. When I worked with her several months ago on a rather challenging project, she was always complaining about how bad our new project leader was at managing clients and how lazy our new interaction designer was.
All of these women are extremely smart, talented, and can probably solve difficult business problems, but why is it when it comes to people-related issue, they give up so easily and turn into a whining 3-year old baby ?
I was like one of them about 2 years ago and probably still am to a certain degree if I don't observe my behavior carefully. It was the first time I was fully in charge of a large scale project. My boss (let's just call her Jane) had just been promoted to her new role. Jane was a rather controlling manager. She would attempt to do what I was suppose to do because she didn't feel what I was doing was meeting her standard. This created a lot of confusion to my direct reports as they would receive directions from both me and Jane. At the same time, I wanted Jane to spend less time managing the day to day work and more time on communicating with our client's senior management team. Instead of really trying to work things out with Jane, I escalated this problem to our director, hoping that he could interfere and help to resolve the tension between me and Jane. He had
an 1-on-1 talk with Jane and encouraged her to give me a bit more room.
Things improved a bit for the next few days, however, the tension between us quickly turned up again. The problem that our client had come to us for wasn't very difficult to solve but our team couldn't align ourselves to a solution. Our director decided that it's probably better that I rolled off from the project; Jane led the team directly and someone more senior than Jane to manage clients. Looking back, instead of trying to support Jane in her new role, I spent most of time thinking and complaining to others how terrible of a leader Jane was. This mentality guided how I interacted and treated her. She must have felt my hostile behavior although I never openly challenged her ability.
I learned two important lessons from this experience. This first one is that If I can't solve people related issue, I can't solve any issue and the second one was there is absolutely no, zero, nada benefit if you maintain a poor relationship with your boss. No matter where I work or what type of work I do, there is always going to be someone who won't behave the way I have hoped but this person has some influence on the success of my work. I can choose to let this person become a bottleneck to my success or I can learn to deal with him. This realization was important for me because that's when I changed my mindset from “I am a victim of a terrible boss/team member/client" to "I must acquire skills to deal with such situation." As much as I want my boss to be supportive, my team member to be capable and my client to be helpful, sometimes things just don't go as I wish and I have absolutely no control over how these people act. The only thing I can do is to just accept them for whom they are yet find ways to influence them. After all, I am far from perfect so why should the people I work be?
But I gotta tell you, the shift in mentality is the easier part, learning the "soft skills" to deal with the situation is a much harder part. To be honest, I don't think I have master this yet and it's very likely that I will need to spend the rest of my life learning this skill. If you are really interested in working on your people skill, I highly recommend Dale Carnegie's all-time classic book "How to win friends and influence others & how to stop worrying and start living" In this book Dale suggested his readers to record every mistake they make on peoplerelated matters and review these mistakes every weekend until they no longer make them. This sounds like a lot of hard work but I am quite convinced that is the process that one needs to go through to change old habits.
But if keeping notebook and being so self-reflective all the time is not your thing, I find maintaining a humble and grateful attitude goes a long way when dealing with people issue. I am not saying that you can't be aggressive or lower your standard, I am only suggesting you to think outside of yourself, do more for your boss, team, project and the company. Instead of thinking you are smarter or assume your answer is better than others, be humble and helpful. I think this works probably because when one is humble and helpful, one inspires people around him to reciprocate with the similar behavior. When everyone is humble and helpful, that's when collaboration will truly blossom. And when collaboration blossoms, you are more likely to achieve what you set out to accomplish.
做谦虚而有用的人
不久前，我的一位大学好友因为与上司不和，被调到别的部门。她用“愚蠢，懒惰，总是抢她的功绩”来形容她的上司。我的另一个朋友萨拉，公司的CEO 在找到替代她的合适人选之后就叫她立刻走人。她当初是由一家非常有名望的私募基金公司雇来协助它旗下控股公司CEO 的日常运营。从很早以前，萨拉就开始向我控诉她的CEO 是多么的不专业，对他自己带来的人有多偏袒，而那些人又和他一样没什么能力。就在上周，我们的一个高级设计师默默地辞职了。几个月前我和她合作完成一个极具挑战性的项目，她总是抱怨我们的新项目负责人在管理客户方面有多不称职，我们新配的合作设计师有多么懒。
这些女人们都非常聪明而有天分，能够解决业务难题，但是为什么一到了和人打交道的问题上，她们就变得这么容易放弃，好像只会发牢骚的三岁小孩？
大约在两年前我也和她们一样，甚至到现在，某种程度上说如果我不好好审视自己的行为，便还是老样子。记得那是我第一次带大项目的时候，我的上司（让我们暂且称呼她为“简”）是刚刚被提升上来的。简是一个有着极强控制欲的经理，她会试着去做我要做的事情，因为她觉得我做的有可能达不到她的要求。这直接给我的部下们造成了混乱，因为他们会同时接到来自她和我双方面的指示。并且，我希望简能花更多的时间在与客户方高级经理的沟通上，而不是在安排己方的日常琐事上面。我并没有努力去解决和她之间的问题，而是把问题直接告诉了高层主管，希望他出面干涉，帮助缓和我们之间的气氛。于是他和简进行了一次谈话，让简给我多一些空间。
接下来的几天进展顺利了一些，但很快，我们之间的紧张气氛又开始升级。客户来寻求帮助的问题本来并不难解决，但是我们的团队却不能齐心协力，用了六个星期还是没有解决，于是我们的高层主管要求我退出项目，由简直接领导团队，并再找一个更高级别的人来应对客户。反思整件事，面对那样的局面我并不是尽力去支持新官上任的简，而是不停地和别人抱怨她有多不好。这种心态直接影响了我对她的态度和与她的配合。她一定也感觉到了我的敌对情绪，尽管我并没有公然挑战她的权威。
这次的经历给我上了重要的两课：第一课，如果我不能处理好人际关系的问题，那么我也解决不了其他任何问题；第二课，和直属老板关系不好，那可是一点好处也没有。无论在哪里工作，做何种类型的事，总会有某些人行为处事与我的预期不相符，而这样的人又往往对我的工作结果有一定的影响。我既可以选择让这个人就此变成我成功道路上的瓶颈，也可以试着学会和他相处。意识到这一点对我来说非常重要，因为我的心态从此由“我是一个遇上糟糕的老板/ 同事/ 客户的倒霉蛋”，变成了“我必须学习如何应对这种情情况”。尽管我内心希望遇到支持我的老板，有能力的团队成员，能很好配合我的客户，但有时候事情就是不会按照自己的想法发展，而我也无法控制他人的行为。我唯一能做的就是适应他们，接受他们，找到影响他们的方式。毕竟，连我自己都不完美，凭什么这样要求和我共事的其他人？
但我必须告诉你，心态的转变其实是相对容易的事，培养应对这种情况的“软实力”才是难事。说实话，我并没有完全掌握这种能力，很可能一辈子都要不断地学习这方面的能力。如果你真的对培养自己的实力有兴趣，我强烈推荐戴尔? 卡耐基的畅销著作《人性的弱点》——“如何赢得友谊，影响他人，和怎样停止忧虑，开始新的生活”。在书中戴尔建议读者把自己每天在处理人事关系时犯的每一个错误都记录下来，每个周末都回头检查这些错误，直到不再犯为止。咋听上去有些繁琐，但我确信这是一个人要改变老毛病必须走的路。
如果坚持记笔记，经常自我反思这种方式你不喜欢，我觉得常怀感恩之心，谦逊待人也能让你更好地处理人际关系。并不是说你就应该不思进取或者降低要求，只是建议你多为别人着想，为你的老板，团队，项目和整个公司多付出一些。不要自以为是，总觉得自己的方案比别人的好，谦虚一些，让自己更有助于他人吧！我认为这招管用也许是因为当你谦虚了，愿意帮助别人，就更容易激励身边的人以同样的方式回报你。当每个人都变得谦虚而有助益，合作就会真正变得愉快。而合作愉快，你就更容易实现自己设定的目标。
更多精彩内容，请到相关页面点击下载阅读:http://forum.chasedream.com/Career_General/thread-787494-1-1.html |
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发表于 2012-12-10 11:17:35
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