These Difficult Times

January 21, 2007

Working With You Is Killing Me: A Book Review

Introduction

We suffer from a variety of difficulties in life today, but the trickiest difficulty is also the simplest — other people. It seems the clever technology we’ve invented over the past ten-thousand years doesn’t stop other people from irritating us, particularly those who you sit next to in your office for forty hours a week. Aside from the health of you and your family, what factor of daily life could possibly be as important as the people surrounding you at work, many of whom drive you insane? Not one can supercede this paramount factor. At work, it’s crucial you collaborate with other people successfully, yet we possess little technology directly aiding us in doing so psychologically.

About a year ago, I came across a new development in this issue — a book called Working With You is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself From Emotional Traps At Work (or WWYIKM) which you can learn more about here.

Its authors, business strategist Kathi Elster and psychologist Katherine Crowley, wrote it to present many of the personal dynamics which cause you to go crazy. They identify several different profile types of crazy-makers commonly found in our workplaces, and this book could easily have been named Handling Difficult People. WWYIKM covers a timeless topic and was helpful enough for me to share with you now my thoughts on it.

What This Book Accomplishes: It Presents a New and Useful Metaphor

WWYIKM identifies a social dynamic everyone feels at one time or another: being so upset, furious, and enraged you can’t even think. To identify this wretched situation and its various manifestations, Elster and Crowley present a metaphor of extreme utility:

• being hooked

The metaphor of “being hooked” forms the meat of the book. This is the engine around which they build a complex and thorough coping system. The techniques and tools presented by the authors spring forth in bold relief after identifying this phenomena.

Being Hooked

Far and away the most important idea proposed within WWYIKM is the metaphor of “the hook.” This metaphor contains the image of another person actually hooking you with a big fishing hook and dragging you around. When you become “hooked” by someone, it means you’ve dropped your guard and become unhinged. This image tells you you’ve lost control of yourself.

The mere mention of this phenomena of hooking is helpful. It articulates this universal sensation — somebody driving you nuts — in a language which poetically rings true. I am an aficionado of metaphors, and from this nice one stems my effusive admiration for their work. To me, Elster and Crowley’s acts of inventing and presenting this new and powerful metaphor is a huge achievement. Once the metaphor for hooking is available, we can articulate ways to unhook. How do you unhook yourself? WWYIKM presents details of four steps for this:

1. Unhook physically
2. Unhook mentally
3. Unhook verbally
4. Unhook with a business tool

Elster and Crowley are very thorough in explaining the different methods of unhooking from difficult situations. But when situations get really bad and you emotionally go beyond the point where the basic unhooking techniques function, you’ve entered another worse stage of distress — the ledge.

The Ledge

When you repeatedly become hooked by the various hookers in your workplace, you may enter a deeper state of distress which Elster and Crowley call “the Ledge.” (Note: this metaphor isn’t discussed in WWYIKM. I attended a lively book reading they did at a nearby Barnes & Noble during which they prominently mentioned “the ledge” metaphor. This, too, fascinates me.)

The metaphor contains the image where you actually stand on the window ledge of a high building or the ledge of a cliff, ready to commit suicide. What an incredible image! Here’s how it works: An event triggers you to become furious and upset so you cease to function properly and go “on the ledge.” This ledge identifies a state of deep emotional distress where, metaphorically speaking, you become suicidal. Then if you can defuse the difficulty, you may talk yourself “off the ledge” or bring yourself “down from the ledge,” where you return to normal, back to your state of functioning properly.

WWYIKM lays down a well-rounded system for how to prevent being hooked in the first place, what actions you can take when you get hooked, and how to talk yourself off the ledge.

WWYIKM Covers a Broad Area

Elster and Crowley’s book covers an incredible expanse of territory. It highlights the importance of boundaries. It discusses how we define them and how to use them as protection at work. Also discussed are critical descriptions of the various difficult types of people, or archetypes. In this area, Elster and Crowley are very thorough and present a complete round-up of the different difficult characters you’ll encounter on your travels.

Of particular importance in WWYIKM are the interpersonal zones of difficulty. When dealing with difficult people, you’ll undoubtedly encounter a complex fogbank of issues. To clarify and organize these issues, WWYIKM identifies five primary zones:

1. You. These are your personal issues within you. This zone applies to how you assume roles at work and how these roles cast you into positions which cause you difficulty by hooking you.
2. Your Peers. These are issues within your peers which affect you. This zone applies to how others assume roles at work and how your co-workers cast themselves into positions and create difficulties for you. One interesting aspect of this zone is how the power dynamics between you and your peer is symmetrical.
3. Your Boss. This zone applies to the relationship between you and your boss and how its power dynamic is often of striking asymmetry. You could be fired on the spot! Your boss can hook you by assuming a role which causes you an incredible amount of difficulty. This role may tap into your personal issues and feed off the role you assume while at work.
4. Your Employees. This zone applies to the people who work for you and how you relate to them. They are not your peers, they are in positions of power under you, and for whom you play an important and dominant role in their daily lives.
5. Your Company. This zone applies to the overall culture of the business you work in.

Below is a graphic I created to conceptualize the minefield of difficulties which can arise around you. Quite a minefield, these ubiquitous perils, mmm?

The Five Zones of Interpersonal Difficulties
In the Business World

WWYIKM Offers a Coherent Coping System of Extreme Utility

WWIKYM builds upon the interpersonal zones and creates several fascinating systems:

• A set of archetypes for each zone: WWYIKM identifies and explains the details about each archetype.
• A system for how to cope with various difficult archetype at each zone: You might’ve inadvertently assumed one of the archetypes at work, and the authors present a variety of ways how you can defuse the archetypically difficult co-workers.
• A procedure with which to deal with each difficult archetype: (a) Detect, (b) Detach, (c) Depersonalize, (d) Deal.

In short, WWYIKM delivers a complete framework for dealing gracefully with difficult people.

Other Goodies

This book presents several other useful tools. My favorites are two questionnaires presented at the end of the book: the Personal Inventory and Workplace Appraisal questionnaires. These allow you to assess the culture of the company you work for, and they blew my mind. After looking at them closely, they make a lot of sense and are so obvious I’m amazed no one else thought of it before. Another huge achievement.

In Conclusion

When I see them, I look very carefully at books which deal so directly with difficulties, as WWYIKM does. The topic of difficulty is highly competitive and many authors and thinkers have entered the fray, and I have read many books on it. That said, I’d also like to tell you how special this book is.

WWYIK is a work of thought without flaw — a very rare diamond — and I was immediately fascinated with it. I tracked its sales performance on Amazon’s Sales Rank and watched it sell briskly from the very start, and at one point early on, it enjoyed a high rank in Amazon’s business bestsellers section: the mid-fifties — an astonishing performance. Today, depending upon what day of the week you look, WWYIKM sits between the comfortable mid ten-thousands all the way down to the two-hundred thousands. Why it seems to have fallen out of favor remains to me inexplicable.

But allow me to change gears. Think about our technological culture for a moment, and note the myriad of handy doohickeys we use. Sure, we enjoy a smorgasbord of telecommunication technology, but:

• Do we possess technology that keeps us calm ourselves in the face of difficult people? Nope.
• Does telecommunication technology allow new avenues for us unhook or bring us off the ledge? Well, yeah, it does — the telephone, fax, email, VoIP, text messages, and video-conferencing can potentially all be good unhooking tools. But unless you know you actually need to unhook, how could these tools help protect you and what good can they do? Not much.
• I say we suffer from a distinct lack of tools for dealing with difficult people. Does our telecommunication technology resolve this deficiency? Not specifically, no. Does technology complicate it? Yes. It certainly does make dealing with difficult people more complex. The issue at hand here is: these technologies were not explicitly designed to help you unhook, although you can use them for this. I believe technology doesn’t aid us in dealing with difficult people. Generally, it just gets in the way. You have to do it not digitally but analogly.

There is a gaping void in technology for helping us interact with troublemakers; We lack tools to handle difficult people. This is why WWYIKM becomes so important. Elster and Crowley take us a huge step forward by tackling what technology ignores. Their book is as close as I’ve ever seen to a manual on how to handle difficult people. And this book presents a coherent coping system of extreme utility.

BONUS ROUND

A few extra questions occurred to me which I pose to you for intellectual stimulation:

• Is it possible to apply the metaphors of being hooked and Elster and Crowley’s techniques toward entities larger than corporations, i.e. on a cultural level?
• Would they work on specific ethnicities?
• Would they work at the level of nations?
• How would a center for international-affairs benefit from these ideas?

Something to think about anyway.

Posted by Rob at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)