June 4, 2010

Are You a Pain-In-The-Ass Person?

She calls me again. A business acquaintance of mine, who wants to partner up with me for this training, learning, changing the world project she has in mind. And again I say: “Thanks, but no thanks”.

The project is not the problem. It seems like a good idea. The person is the problem. I know from one too many previous experiences that working with her, interacting with her, is a burden. She is what I call a pain in the ass person.

You know the type: the manager whose employees quit constantly, the businessman nobody wants to work with, the friend nobody wants to hang out with. Even though this person might have good professional skills, because of bad character and even worse people skills, she manages to make everybody want to stay away from her. And of course, like most people in this category, she has no clue why this is happening and thinks people are just mean, evil creatures.

Unfortunately, pain in the ass people are very common. Over the years, I have worked with these kinds of people, helping them improve their people skills and attitudes. Are you a pain in the ass person?

I believe that the most important steps in not being a pain in the ass person are to accept that you might be one, at least to a certain degree, to understand the key traits this person has and to look for them at your own person. Here are some of the essential traits from my perspective:

1. Compulsive lying. Pain in the ass people will constantly tell you what they believe you want to here, without really thinking whether it’s the truth or not. They will make stuff up and lie constantly. Even when you catch them, they will apologize and promise not to do it again, than they’ll do it 10 minutes later. This makes it very hard to trust them. Speaking of promises…

2. Not keeping their promises. Pain in the ass people will promise big things all the time, but they will not even manage to keep their small promises. They will promise to send you an email tomorrow, and they will do it in 3 days. They will promise you an 800$ fee, and after you finish your job they’ll tell you they can only give you 400$.

 

3. Lack of fairness. Pain in the ass people will often want you to do most of the work, while they get most of the money and the appreciation. They bring little value to the table but they want to get as much value as possible. And when you ask for your fair share, they won’t think twice about calling you selfish, but they will fail to see their selfishness, especially when it’s even visible to a blind man.

4. Bad listening skills. Pain in the ass people will generally have bad communication skills, but their listening skills are usually the worse. They don’t really listen when you talk; they just phase out and think about their stuff. Then, when they have a thought they want to express, they will just interrupt you brutally and say it. This is how a hypothetical dialog with these people takes place.

5. Opposition to any idea different than their own. Pain in the ass people will reject your ideas simply because they are different from theirs. Their big egos cannot tolerate the thought that they are wrong or that someone else has a better idea. They will often try to bring arguments to support their side but in the end, even if they lose the debate on logic and arguments, they will simply ignore this and just say: “No, you’re wrong. We’ll do it my way.”

If you identify any of these traits at yourself, I strongly suggest you work on your people skills and eliminate them. These traits sabotage your relationships and performances like crazy. If you’re working or interacting with a person with these traits, I have 6 words for you: Get the hell out of there!

Filed Under: Career, People Skills Tagged With: , , 36 Comments
May 31, 2010

Good People Skills = Building Trust

This is a guest post by my friend Maria Dinu (Galca), who is an Effectiveness Coach. She works full time in HR for a Fortune 100 Company, and coaches in her free time. She blogs about how to better manage your life on LifeToolkit.net.

I pride myself with having worked with various types of people in my 10 year career in the NGO and corporate field of HR. I’ve seen young people who were very close-minded, 16 year olds who were wiser than 50 year olds, company leaders who mocked their people, or Finance leaders who could explain the business in 5 minutes to their kid. I’ve had bosses I loved, although they knew little business, and bosses I … well, didn’t like so much, although they were experts.

And there’s one thing I noticed, in all these cases.

In business, and life in general, you’re nothing if you can’t build trust.
Trust = Credibility.
Trust = Leadership.

If people trust you, they will ultimately follow you. As Stephen R. Covey puts it, in his very good book “The Speed of Trust”, trust can get people to accomplish things in a company much, much faster.

Relationships based on trust work faster, because there are no insecurities. There are no check-ups. There are very few fights. And, what’s a company, if not an intricate set of relationships?

How do you build trust?
The saying “It takes 10 years to build trust, and one second to destroy it” is very true. Trust is built through time. But I’ve seen results in months, if not days. Let me tell you a story.

Some years ago, I worked with a person for whom I made every day difficult, on purpose. I’m not proud to say that, and I did not enjoy that time. The reason I did it was that somewhere, in my mind, I had the feeling that new manager would spoil my career. She was new, and she had not established herself correctly in front of our team. So, I said, why not show her that this is not the way things work?
(Of course, things did not work. They only got worse)
What changed dramatically was that I found out she supported me. She talked to me openly about the situation, and showed me she cared. And things did happen. Turns out, I was wrong. And feeling ashamed.
Afterwards, she became, if not a good friend, an esteemed manager from whom I learned a lot, despite differences.

1. The number one way to build trust in your relationships, is show people you care. If your team feels you care, they will be there for you. Go out for coffee with them. One of the very good team leaders I know established excellent relationships with her people from Day 1, taking them out to beer, and saying openly “I’m here for you. I’m human, just as you.” A great HR Manager I worked with gained the trust of her 100+ people saying in an open meeting “I’m here to help.”

2. You don’t need to be a best friend. Only respect your word. OK, going out to beer with the team is a good way to build relationships. But I never went to beer with my previous boss – all the trust established was gained from respecting one’s word.

3. Transparency, even in the worst situations, can gain you more trust and support, than keeping “the bad news” a secret. In the time of crisis, many companies had to let people go. Imagine the number of business managers who had to go in front of their people and say “We’re not doing well.” Who would have the guts to do that?

Well, it turns out from various studies (including the reputed Mc Kinsey) that transparency gains you more trust than if you shove the dirt under the carpet. Going in front of the team and saying “We’re not doing well, and here’s why, and here’s what I’m doing about it” will get your people supporting you than ever. And, you know, it just might be THE thing to get the company out of difficult times.

Building a circle of people who trust you may be the best thing you do in your career. Not only will they recommend you, support you and encourage you, but they will help you reach your goals faster, and in a more productive way than ever before.

Filed Under: Career, People Skills Tagged With: , , , , 5 Comments
March 23, 2010

Discovering What You Have to Offer

If there is one category of people I know which struggle with their confidence, happiness and people skills, it’s those who don’t really believe they have anything valuable to offer. You have never seen a sadder look on someone’s face!

As a result of this core belief, the people in this category often believe a couple of other disempowering things as well:

  • That they are not employable and can’t find a job;
  • That they are not likeable and can’t find friends;
  • That they are not attractive and can’t find a partner;
  • That they are not useful and can’t contribute to the world.

With thoughts like these in your head, your future will not look very bright. The good news is there are ways out of this mindframe. In helping my clients improve their confidence and their people skills by handling this, there are 3 things which provide great results:

1. Identifying talents. I don’t care if you spent all your life eating popcorn and watching reruns of Seinfeld, you still have talents. Because talents (in my definition) are not dependent on your conscious efforts. They are your natural abilities. They usually develop in childhood, as part of simply living your life, or you are born with them.

We all have talents. Do you know yours? If not, then this is what’s very important for you to discover. Maybe you’re analytical, organized, creative, empathic, a clear communicator, a high energy person, good with numbers, attentive with details, a good singer. These can all be talents, things you naturally have to offer.

2. Identifying hidden skills. Most of us are not very good at understanding what our skills are because we think of a skill as something we develop in formal way, and we get a diploma to certify it. This is rarely the case. Most skills are learned in a more informal way, by simply doing stuff.

Consider the person who allays organizes huge parties for her friends, all their vacations and travelling. This person probably developed very good event organizing skills this way. She is one step away from the money-making business skill of events organizing. And probably, she is not even aware of it.

3. Starting from where you are. OK: even if you don’t really have a lot to offer, what does that mean? Nothing. It’s just where you are right now. You have a lot of space to work on your personal development and get some valuable skills under your belt.

So do not whine, do not feel bad, look at this simply as your starting point and evolve. Take a class, read a book, practice, get feedback, adapt, practice some more. As you learn various stuff, as you grow as a person and as a professional, you start to believe more and more that you have to offer a lot of value in this world.

But for most people, this third point is not the core problem. They have a lot of skills, a lot to offer. They just don’t know it. It’s a self-knowledge and self image thing rather than a real lack of value they can bring. This is why the most important step is a change of perception.

Filed Under: Career, Inspirational, Lifestyle Tagged With: , , 6 Comments
February 7, 2010

Asshole – Book Recommendation

Yes, the book is actually called “Asshole: How I Got Rich and Happy by Not Giving a @!?* About You”, and it’s written by Martin Kihn. I’ve listened to the audio version the past few days, and it quickly made the list of my favorite books.

You can find other valuable info and reviews for the book on Amazon, and you can listen to a free audio sample on LoDingo.

Just turning 40, Martin realizes that his life and his career are not what he dreamed of, and being too nice is the main cause for this. This is how he describes himself in the book:

If you asked me to do you a favor, even the kind of favor that required me to go so far out of my way I needed a map, a translator and an oxygen tank, even if I didn’t know you that well, I might hesitate a second, hoping you’d think of someone else to irritate, but I’d always say yes.

So in order to get what he wants, Martin decides to get rid of his people pleasing persona and turn himself into an asshole. The book is the entertaining and at the same time inspirational story of this real journey and its results, a journey which involves among other things, taking life coaching, acting classes and boxing lessons.

As a personal development passionate, what I liked most about “Asshole” is that it’s a real life experiment, conducted by a real person and then put into words. Some of the ideas Martin implemented you might find a bit too out-there and not want to try, but there are definitely a lot of people skills and personal development ideas you will want to put into practice if you find yourself being very nice, all the time. If you’re wondering: “What’s wrong with being very nice, all the time?” then you definitely need to get this book.

One such idea I found useful is interrupting people. I don’t think it’s a good thing to do this constantly and make it your way of communicating with others, but I do think every once in a while, it has its place in communication. Yet a lot of people I’ve worked with (me included) have or used to have problems in this area and simply could not interrupt people, even if they may have gotten interrupted all the time.

Besides the practical and inspirational side, “Asshole” is written in a very humorous way, using witty language and describing some out of the box experiences one would naturally encounter when deciding to become an asshole. I laughed through the entire audio-book. I recommend you buy the audio version of the book, as all the voice acting only enhances the humor and makes the book even more entertaining.

As for the lessons of the book: is being nice bad? Is becoming an asshole an actual way to improve your people skills? What did Martin decide after his experiment? Well, you’ll just have to go though the book, get the facts and reach your own conclusions.

Filed Under: Career, People Skills, Success Tagged With: , , 10 Comments
January 8, 2010

Positive Thinking Won’t Help You Now

I’m not a big fan of positive thinking as a tool for self-help. I believe that used in the wrong place, at the wrong time, it can be just as dangerous as negative thinking. I’m rather a fan of what you might call strategic thinking in personal development: focusing on the positive or the negative, depending on what serves you best in the given context.

From my perspective, challenging economic times like the ones most of us are living right now, are just some of those contexts in which seeking help in positive thinking can cause some serious trouble.

In the past months, I have seen people loose a tone of money and bankrupt businesses by looking on the bright side and thinking positively. It can be quite shocking to see such a popular personal development tool have such negative consequences instead of providing the promised help.

Why do things like these happen? Because positive thinking means focusing on the good things and always expecting excellent results. In the face of big challenges, this is the equivalent of ignoring important parts of reality. It’s like blinding yourself while speed driving on a mountain road, during a storm, in a convertible. Why the hell would you wanna do that?

For the people I’m talking about here, positive thinking meant they ignored that the status quo has changed and doing what they did before will no longer get them the same results, or the same results where sometimes no longer possible. They blinded themselves to the fact they needed to adapt in a dramatic way. One man for instance, while being in a plummeting industry, convinced himself he can have the same sales numbers he had last year, if he just… tried harder. He called this “being positive”.

You cannot deny important facts and expect good results. Like it or not, we are in a global economic crisis, people have less money, they are spending less and there is more competition between businesses. No matter how good you are at what you do, this will have consequences over you.

Positive thinking is not a panacea, even if some trainers, coaches, speakers or authors promote it in this manner. It will not help you solve all of your problems and get everything you want, doing what you want, all the time. Being positive is a way of thinking which only has power to help you if you use it the right way.

There is a way of using positive thinking that can help you in challenging times. But it does not involve day-dreaming. It involves these two things:

  1. Realizing that even if some negative things may happen, even if you may not get your way now, it’s not a tragedy.
  2. Realizing that times change and in the long run, you will get your way and you can achieve your bold objectives.

That’s it. It’s strategic, realistic positive thinking. A more effective self improvement tool, that can help you handle the challenges of life both practically and emotionally.

Filed Under: Attitude, Career, Inspirational, Personal Development Tagged With: , , , , 21 Comments
November 2, 2009

Enough with the Mind Reading: Get a 360 Feedback!

I find that a whole lot of people worry about how others perceive them. They worry, and that’s it. They don’t do anything to actually get a realistic view on the matter. At best, they just try to guess it, they try to mind read it and every once in a while, they ask a person they feel comfortable with what she thinks about them.

If what others think about you is something that’s on your mind, do yourself  a favor, and do something effective about it: get a proper 360 degrees feedback (aka 360).

A 360 is an assessment of your person, from multiple sources. It is usually given by supervisors, peers and subordinates. Clients, suppliers can also chip in, and even friends or family if you wanna get a perspective beyond you professional life.

I used a 360 degrees feedback for myself repeatedly and I often use it with clients. The fact that it is structured and rich in information makes the results very meaningful. You won’t find out perfectly how everybody sees you, but it’s certainty a lot more scientific than guessing.

I think there are 3 main things you can do with the information you gain from a 360 degrees feedback, other than just wondering why people think you’re selfish when you buy everybody Christmas presents:

  1. Discover the traits you project with ease in any situation and use this for personal branding.
  2. Discover the traits you repress, you hide from others, and use this for becoming more expressive.
  3. Discover your strengths and weaknesses you may not have been aware of, and use this for personal development.

Knowing about the tool is one thing. Using it effectively is another. Here are my top tips for making the most out of a 360:

  • Use a standardized questionnaire for everyone that gives you feedback;
  • Ask specific questions and use very clear phrasing;
  • Ask for feedback from people that know you and care about you;
  • Allow the option of anonymous feedback to help people be more honest;
  • Get feedback from at least 10 people to have representative results;
  • Remember that how others see you is not necessarily how you are.
  • Remember it’s just a feedback, not a flawless evaluation tool.

Getting a 360 degrees feedback takes some effort and most importantly, some courage. Most of us are not used to asking others for clear and specific feedback about ourselves. Asking for it is a statement that we are vulnerable to their perception and it’s a request for something some find risky to give: honest evaluations. Expect this to take you and them out of your comfort zones, and embrace it.

If you’re interested in a specific 360 degrees feedback tool, I recommend 360°Reach by William Arruda. It’s an online assessment that’s well designed, easy to use for personal development or branding, and you can try it free of charge for 15 days. So, enjoy it!

Filed Under: Career, Personal Development Tagged With: , , , , , 29 Comments
October 21, 2009

Constructive Attitudes after Getting Fired

So you got the F word at your job, ha? No, not that one; the other one! Getting fired not only has practical negative consequences (especially in a crisis period), but also emotional ones. Oddly, enough, until you handle the emotional ones effectively, your chances of handling the practical ones effectively are waaay slimmer.

So for me, the process is not 1) get a new job 2) then feel better; it’s 1) feel OK, 2) then get a new job, 3) then feel even better. I think you wanna have constructive attitudes after being fired. Not positive ones, not negative ones, but the one that help you the most to get results.

With this premise in mind, here are my top 3 people skills ideas for having constructive attitudes after getting fired:

1. Mourn. Pissed off and panicked after losing your job, don’t go straight into looking for a new one. It may seem logical to act quickly, but actually, you are probably nowhere near the emotional state to be looking for a new job. Because of this, you can do a lot more damage than good.

Instead, take a mourning period. My recommendation is anywhere between 3 days and 2 weeks, depending on how hard losing your job hit you emotionally. In this period, get used to the thought that your previous job is no more and that the future is ahead of you. Don’t repress the pain – it’s a natural part of the healing process – just let it go through you and drip out.  

2. Detach. Easier said then done. How do you do it? The most powerful advice I can give you here is understand you are not your job. We live in a society that wrongfully teaches us to define ourselves by our job, our car, our clothes etc. Even though it may seem otherwise after you just got fired, where you work and what you do does not define you as a person; it’s just one part of the way you live. Get this thought really deep in your head.

3. Don’t blame. Almost every time a person tells me about loosing her job (and I have a lot of clients in this category), this sentence is followed by blaming someone or something outside of her: “My boss is incompetent and was intimidated by me professionally”, “Someone else got my job based on relations”, “The company does not appreciate my skills”.

Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. Either way, one thing I always notice with these people is that blaming is toxic. Instead of making them feel better, it often gets them feeling worse and it prevents them from seeing their own faults and approaching the job hunting process effectively. So, put the blaming aside and just move to the next step.

Once you have constructive attitudes about getting fired, you are properly equipped emotionally to move to the next personal development step: the actual process of finding a new job.

Filed Under: Attitude, Career Tagged With: , , , 6 Comments