On occasion, you might come across as a different person to different people and vice-versa. At work you find all kinds of people, but your professional and personal growth depends on your ability to work with people with different styles.
Because of this, being able to engage with multi-faceted people from a range of different backgrounds will help you achieve long-term success as a product manager. Besides tending to different backgrounds, you also need to develop an ability to handle difficult coworkers. Every team tends to have a disruptive person, so learning how to handle them is essential for ensuring that the overall success of the team doesn’t suffer.
In this article, you’ll learn about how you can engage with your team in an intentional way that prioritizes clear communication and understanding, as well as read about common personas that can cause disruptions to your workflow.
People management refers to the task of managing, overseeing, and optimizing employees to drive a team towards achieving its organizational goals. To achieve this, you need to have strong interpersonal and leadership abilities that allow you to understand how to bring out the best in someone. The biggest obstruction to effective people management is difficult people.
However, while you might be tempted to think the problem lies with the person themself, you should always consider how the situation or setting might be contributing to their behavior. Certain situations make people act in a particular way. As a PM, try to be as attentive to this as possible and try to shift the situation to avoid disruptions.
To help you manage and mitigate potential disruptions, let’s take a look at three of the most common personas that might arise within your team:
You propose an idea and it’s a “no;” you propose another idea and that’s a “no, too”…
You keep trying to rack your brains for solutions, innovations but all this person comes up with is problems, roadblocks and potential failures for every solution.
Don’t debate with them, don’t get angry, and don’t try to solve every problem they come up with. Instead, tell them your vision or broad outlook. Ask them their outlook and then ask them to describe the “how.” Then, work to co-create it with them.
Remember, they might even say no to the broad outlook/vision. In that case, don’t get worked up. Instead, frame questions as an attempt to define the outlook.
“It’s not not my fault… I wasn’t aware…
These are all forms of excuses you will hear. A team member might join the daily sprint but need another separate 1on1 call to explain everything again. This makes you wonder what they were doing in the sprint call.
Another example might be the person who starts tasks, but then can never seem to finish them. It’s easy to get sucked into the facade of this helplessness because you want to be kind and help people. Be careful with this though because you need to make sure this behavior doesn’t just continue indefinitely.
Shift the conversation by asking them what they could have done differently, or how they could’ve changed the outcome for the better. Empathize, but make sure that you encourage growth, instead of just enabling the same behavior.
“This isn’t how it should’ve been done… It was supposed to be communicated to us or we should be notified of every action”
Notice the hint of “it’s not my problem,” but the process was not followed and also how it’s worded as a “we” problem and not an “I.” This is the kind of person who flies off the handle at the tiniest hint of a trigger. They assume self-importance.
Keep in touch with them and provide information so they’re not anxious. Offer factual evidence on why certain decisions were made without them and always have an open conversation with them in group settings. In case they act out too much, others may step in, in your favor.
Now that you have a sense of some common behaviors you might encounter, you need to determine the best approach for handling disruptions when they arise. To that end, you can employ the following strategies:
Openly sharing your journey/motivations and being vulnerable encourages the other person to do the same and creates a space to get to know each other before you start working together on a day-to-day basis. Knowing the other person also gives you a window to what others may have not seen. You can carve a mutually beneficial learning journey with the so-called difficult person and also deliver on outcomes for both of you.
Always focus on the why rather than the how. As I said earlier, at times, people who seem difficult to work with might be because they don’t know how to best collaborate or delegate or get support. However, their intention could be in the right place.
Share feedback honestly. Don’t focus on what they did, focus on how they made you feel because even the most difficult person cannot negate what you felt. They can justify their actions or ignore your suggestions, but they cannot change how their actions made you feel.
Even after going through it with someone and trying your best, someone might not show any signs of change. In this case, it might be best to simply walk away. This way you can focus on growth and not vengeance or frustrations.
Build a close circle of trust where you can be vulnerable and share your concerns. Then slowly distill information as you start going outside that circle. A PM needs to control both the density and flow of information.
Ask yourself, is the information at the right altitude for the audience I am sharing with? Even simple things matter, if you think that Slack message seems aggressive for no reason, jump on a video call to clear things out. You’ll be surprised to learn how much every team member cares for the users you’re serving.
Featured image source: IconScout
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