How to Deal With Difficult Relationships At Work

Have you ever had a very difficult office relationship that made your work experience painful? Here’s my advice for handling it effectively!

Featured in Society, the official magazine of The Social Register of Las Vegas.

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How to Deal With Difficult Relationships At Work

We’ve all experienced difficult relationships at work, which create feelings or emotions we can’t necessarily express in the office. Many of these difficult relationships can go on for years and affect customer relations, productivity, efficiency, job satisfaction, and personal well-being. Through my work as a life coach, I have discovered a number of tools and techniques available that will help mitigate and transform such difficult relationships.  It might not create a kumbaya, but the positive results can be astonishing.

Based on my experience in organizations, I have discovered three critical forms of engagement that get to the heart of dealing with difficult relationships.

Focus on shared interests

When you take the time to find out what is important to another person, it shows that you are interested in them as an individual.  The basis for developing genuine relationships starts with asking specific, open-ended questions where finding common interests are discovered and built upon. A simple way to start the process is to have them tell you about their experience.  You continue to direct the attention back to the other person through repeating back when they just said (which shows you are listening), and using their words to develop the next question.

Listen to their responses

Handling a difficult situation in an assertive manner does not guarantee the other person will agree and be compliant.  Even the best suggestions have potential problems, and you may be questioned on your ideas.  Pay careful attention to what they say.  Active listening is where you are alert and attentive to not only the words the person is saying, but to the meaning behind those words.  It is the understanding of the complete message being communicated.  Becoming distracted by other things or formulating a response creates misunderstanding of the message.  Be alert to perceiving their questioning as a personal attack.  Work to handle their response reasonably, and assertively.

Clarify perceptions

Misunderstandings arise.  Repeating back what the other just said ensures that everyone fully understands each other’s standpoint. Take the stance as a good role model by listening with empathy and summarizing the important points clearly and unemotionally. Use ‘we’ statements to describe areas of common ground and to encourage a more collaborative approach.

Relationships, regardless of whether at work or at home, carry some noise and messiness. In organization life, however, the cost for allowing difficult relationships to get out of hand can be staggering. Therefore it makes all the more sense to apply low cost, high touch solutions to create a productive work climate where most good intentioned employees can thrive.

There are many more tools available from the field of life coaching and a well worth exploring in solving common problems life difficult relationships in the workplace.

Sharon Nelson is a certified facilitator in Accelerated Adult Learning, Enneagram, and Appreciative Inquiry; cutting edge modalities for effective life communications.  Author and presenter of “Why We Do the Things We Do” and owner of Where Life Works, a company providing transformational relationship communication methodologies for companies, individuals, and couples.

 

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