Help, I’m surrounded by jerks

Two decades ago there were only a handful of books offering advice on how to defang the dears. Today there are scores of seminars, workbooks and multimedia tools to help people co-exist with those they wish did not exist. In the spring, Career Press is to publish “151 Quick Ideas to Deal With Difficult People” by Carrie Mason-Draffen. But numerous resources are already on the market, including the succinctly titled “Since Strangling Isn’t an Option” by Sandra A. Crowe.

Next month the Career and Professional Development Center at Duke Law School will for the first time offer a workshop called Dealing With Conflict and Difficult People. In September the negotiation programme in Harvard Law School’s executive education series will present a seminar called Dealing With Difficult People and Difficult Situations. And the Graduate School, United States Department of Agriculture, which offers continuing education classes, has scheduled more than half a dozen seminars entitled Positive Approaches to Difficult People for this year.

Nan Harrison, the vice president of training resources and publication sales for CareerTrack, which every month presents more than 50 public “difficult people” seminars across the country, attributes the increased popularity of such workshops to a desire to improve workplace skills in a time of corporate downsizing and a more competitive job market. “I think the stakes have gotten higher for everyone,” she said.

Other conflict-resolution specialists suggested an unexpected reason for the increasing interest: A post-9/11 desire to make peace, even if it is merely with the wet blanket in the adjoining cubicle.

Difficult people are not harmless. Yet, some scholars say, the problem is not the difficult people themselves. It is you. “There’s a good quote from the Talmud,” said Bruce Elvin, an associate dean and the director of the Career and Professional Development Center at Duke Law School. “ ‘We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.’ That really in my view sums this topic up.”

Psychologists say people exhibit difficult behaviour because they have a need that is not being met. Understanding that need ¿ a colleague may be snappish, for instance, because his personal life is in turmoil ¿ helps take the sting out of his or her actions, they say.

Several authors think it is useful to characterise infuriating people into types and prescribe ways to deal with them, as Robert M. Bramson did in 1981 in Coping With Difficult People, one of the first popular books on the topic. Its overarching lesson is to find a way to communicate with these people because they are not going away. Dr Bramson lists seven difficult behavior types: Hostile-Aggressives, Complainers, Silent and Unresponsives, Super-Agreeables, Know-It-All Experts, Negativists and Indecisives.

These authors say that after categorising the difficult behaviour, you can take steps to rein it in. For example, Dr Rick Brinkman calls one category Whiners. These people rattle off an endless loop of complaints and must be coaxed into problem solving. He suggests listening to them and letting them vent. Chances are, he said, their complaints will be vague and exaggerated. When they begin to repeat their gripes, summarise for them what they have said. Then begin asking specific questions. “You have to keep asking them what they think they should do,” Dr. Brinkman said, to press for resolutions. You might finally say something outrageous, like “What if we were to kill everyone in the other department?”

Stephanie Rosenbloom