Managing difficult relationships in the workplace

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Help my boss is a monster & other workplace relationship trauma- a framework to help you manage this aspect of your job

Your job will demand some level of communication, interpersonal engagement and interaction with your boss, or colleagues and other relationship partners in the organisation. This sounds simple enough but sometimes will prove to be anything but that, especially when you are dealing with difficult characters, behaviors, and perhaps relationship partners with conflicting values and agendas.

In his book, ‘how to win friends and influence people’, Dale Carnegie captures this nicely when he states that “dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you will face, especially if you are in business”—this can be extended to include difficult and awkward workplace relationships with potential career implications.

If this is you, and you are struggling with managing the interpersonal relationships at your workplace generally, or perhaps a specific relationship, or a partnership type— especially for the new 1st generation corporateer—then you have come to the right place.

Or perhaps you run an organisation, and want to limit opportunity or situations where friction and strife in the ranks can undermine the operations or workplace environment.

In this book, I will break down the relationships, and relationship partner types [based on my experiences], and show you how I used this information to construct a more proactive engagement and interaction strategy which has worked for me, and which framework you can use to construct your own matrix. Similarly, organisations can build these metrics into their policies, procedures and performance management frameworks.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck —the essence of my strategy is in the identification, and labeling of the relationship partner—depending on the character, I draw on proven strategy and tactics, and follow a defined response and engagement strategy.

Insofar as this broad framework is concerned, it maps out and covers the key interpersonal workplace relationships, namely, the boss, colleagues, staff, or subordinates and, of course, the self-relationship.

In each relationship type, I have created 2-3 broad avatar [character types] constructs [together with defining characteristics and behavioral patterns or features]—using these avatars and references to build-out a broad response strategy.

In terms of the actual response tactics, fundamentally I seek out and employ objective measures and references to remove some of the subjectivity and awkwardness in managing these situations.

Whilst the methodology might not get you into the corner office [nor does it claim to do so], it will provide a framework and reference, to manage and to navigate the travails of the interpersonal workplace complexities more effectively.

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