How to Handle Mean Coworkers | eHow.com

How to Handle Mean Coworkers | eHow.com
This is a site rich in ideas for handling conflict with co-workers. Often conflict and inability to handle it stymies effective change in a workplace. Building some of these skills can support trainees implement positive change once they return from a course.
We're all aware of how easy it is for trainees to fall back into old ways, simply because the site culture won't allow change.

The Winds of Change in Training

Over the Christmas Season we've experienced personally, or through our TV screens, some unsettled, exceptional weather. My partner literally escaped from Salisbury, England, to Heathrow and home as the first snows fell. Hours later, satellite pictures showed Britain blanketed in snow from north to south. Melbourne, meanwhile, shimmered in unbearable heat.

Haiti suffered a massive earthquake that followed fast on tremors felt in many parts of the globe. Ice bergs broke away from the Poles and drifted up into our warmer waters. The physical world, it seems, is trembling on the brink of major change.

Economically organisations are climbing out of difficult times. We realise we can no longer carryout business using past practices, but immersed in the business or doing business it's hard to define how we could do it better.

What skills will our employees need to help us grow our markets? What new products, opportunities or markets are opening up to us? And even if we spot an opportunity, how quickly can we respond to it? They're age-old questions coming to us now at the speed of light.

For years, training has focused on imparting skills that ensure the products or services we produce are created with quality and accuracy. Technology has now advanced in ways that reduce human fallibility, yet still our companies make costly mistakes.

At Edutech KM we've heard the stories from employees who knew that proposed production changes or a new product design wouldn't work, or would cause problems downstream. But did they speak up? Of course not! They didn't believe anyone (i.e.: 'management') would listen to them. Often their beliefs (about not being listened to) have been based on past experience. But even if an employee's belief is a false assumption, the impact is the same. There is undeniably a huge divide between what management tells employees and employees tell management.

One wakeful night I was putting my mind to this dilemma: Is training for skills enough in this new century? What type of training would make a significant change in the way we do, and succeed at, business? The world is overrun by courses that will teach managers to do business well, however, if you think about the companies that succeed best, they are peopled with employees who know they are valued and their contribution is welcomed.

Perhaps we should be looking at two streams of change in training:
1. Train employees to think and speak up
2. Train managers to listen to employees

For this to succeed, employees need to see the larger picture of how their behaviour affects company success and their own long term security. Actually, they need to understand business. Could this lead to a radical about face in training?
1. Give employees business training
2. Give managers skills training

Then we'd all be speaking the same language.

Fire to Inspire

I have just been reading an email newsletter from a site I subscribe to: The Science of Getting Rich NETwork. As I write that down (like a coming OUT story) I imagine that I invite ridicule or dismissive comments from anyone who is reading this. I have exposed my under-belly (and believe me, there is more of that than I'm proud of).

The Science of Getting Rich website, however, fits my experience of how our destinies are controlled by the words our minds (the inner voices) speak to us and especially the words we speak out loud. Note how the inner voice spoke to me when I began writing that first paragraph. It told me that anyone who read those first words would dismiss or ridicule what I said. That's one of the reasons I'm not Bill Gates or Robert Kiyosaki, I'm constantly vetting what I say and do and write. I don't want people to think I'm a crank or silly or gullible.

So how does that relate to training?

Well, in this week's Science of Getting Rich newsletter, Rebecca Fine quotes American author and humorist Mark Twain who said, "I can show anyone how to get what they want. The only trouble is I can't find anyone who can tell me what they want." And then Rebecca goes on to say: "If you don't know -- can't articulate clearly and specifically what it is you really want to be, do, and have; what lights your fire; what it is you'd love to spend your time doing if you could be doing absolutely ANYTHING -- then it's because you don't really know ... who you are."

If at my age I find myself facing those moments of self-doubt and lack of focus, how come I expect younger people to risk focusing on 'what lights (their) fire'? How many young people fall into a career because they trip over it, rather than focusing on what lights their fire? How can they, with little life experience, know what might light their fire?

When young trainees come into a course, often they come because Mum or Dad says it would be a good career to get into. Or they might be on it in order to get a training allowance - the Government says it would be good for them to do. And we expect them to be fully engaged in the course!

Wallace Wattles, who inspired the website The Science of Getting Rich through his book of the same name, said that it doesn't take a lot of energy or will power to keep your mind fixed on something that really grabs you, but that it's VERY difficult to stay focused positively on what you DON'T really want. A career that you fall into is rarely one that fires your soul.

Wouldn't it be great to have a pre-enrollment course called: Seize the Day Your Way, or: Map Your Life in Joy, or: Light Your Mind's Fire? Unfortunately most training establishments rely on student numbers and/or government subsidies. I think they'd have a problem convincing the funders or their accountants that a course supporting young people to find their inner fire would pay its way.

Courses that focus on 'marketable' skills, that in turn slot the participants/trainees into a job, do enhance the bank balance, but the benefit of happy people in careers that inspire them is immeasurable. Imagine if trainers were faced with a group of participants who were already fired up about their new careers? Imagine the dialogues and monumental leaps that would happen in such a group? Can you see how they'd virtually teach themselves as they interacted with the trainer, the new knowledge and their search for answers to questions? It gives me goose-bumps to think about it.

Trainers try to enthuse trainees but are, in turn, chipped away by trainee reluctance and lack of enthusiasm. Hearing constant negativity fuels the negative inner voice. Part of trainee/student negativity stems from their life-stage where training for a skill or career is sensed as the establishment inevitably forcing them to conform. Another critical part is their total lack of knowing themselves as distinct from the group, of knowing who THEY are and what lights their fire.

It's a daunting task - being a trainer. You have to KNOW in your very soul that this is where your fire burns. Otherwise you're just going to be extinguished.