You may constantly experience the behavior of people with bad behaviors around you. These people are fundamentally okay. They are not bad, they are not childish or selfish people. These people often have certain gaps and these gaps make them look difficult to work with. These people may be disorganized, bad at details. They will often make a mistake that will seem for you as bad behavior, but it isn’t. You will always have the option to work around their weaknesses. But you will need to remember that nobody is perfect.
Take the idea of the working teams. In its origin this idea is about what we can make for each other’s weaknesses to help form a team that will be able to handle every challenge we face as a group of people, relying on everyone’s strengths and minimizing everyone’s weaknesses.
Or you make take another option or situation, where you are trying to improve an individual’s performance, by reducing the weaknesses. The other person may not even be fully aware of this weakness, or maybe they are aware of it but don’t want to change or they think they can’t change for good. There are many bad habits we see every day, but here I will focus on four of them that can harm the work and personal relationship with others:
Lateness
Every one of us has a person in his or her work environment that is always late. You call a meeting at 10:00 AM and that person shows at 10:10 AM, or at the end of the meeting. You wait for information from this person on Friday, but the information you need comes next Tuesday, etc. It is very hard to live with that person. But still, you have to find a way to work with him or her. We wonder what we can do to work out this situation. Here is what I can offer you from my experience:
- Invite the person earlier than you need him or her – This works, because you will have to react adequately without losing precious time for others.
- Phone the person – YES, pick up the phone and check if the person is on schedule and will make it with the deadline or the meeting time. For example, if you know that it will take 15 minutes for a regular person to reach a meeting, then call the late lover 30 minutes prior to the meeting, to be sure the person is on his/her way.
It might look annoying to check always one and the same person, but still, if you do that every time you will create a balanced schedule and will help the person to understand that he or she has a problem that has to be handled.
The key here is to point and ask, without judging or blaming. This will help the person to understand and try to change, instead of start searching for ways to defend themselves.
Being bad at listening
Another type of person we all have in our environment is the one who never listens. To live with such type of person you will need to build a strategy to turn attention to them and telling them all the information you have to in small pieces. You have to move away from telling such type of person something long and complicated and you need to watch for body language carefully to identify if they listen to you or are bored and ready to ignore you. A good way to deliver a message to this type of person is to move away from the traditional way of sharing information and transform it into a question and answer round.
For example: Instead of using: You must do it differently if you want to succeed, you may say: “How do you think it could be done differently ?”
Accusing this type of person from being a bad listener doesn’t help. It will look for him or her as a personal attack. Instead of trying to make them feel guilty, you better focus on helping them understand how their behavior affects others in the room.
Moodiness
The third group of people who you can meet at your workplace is the people who have different moods. These people have “good days” and ”bad days”. You won’t succeed if you directly try to change them. What you can do with them is to pick your moments. Watch these people carefully, to decide when is the most appropriate moment to start working with them and get the best out of that relationship. You can ask them how are they feeling today, just to inform you if it is worthy to start trying something together or if it is better to put your energy somewhere else this day. Remember that with these people asking is always preferred than telling and if you use this technique appropriately you will succeed in every task or project, involving people from this group.
Fussiness
In the end, there is one more group of people you will meetin your work environment. This is the person who is fussy or picky. These people are great to work with because they have an eye for details you don’t want to deal with. Often people who annoy us most are the people who we need to better structure our team’s work. To get the best out of a relationship with a fussy person you can set a limit for time, budget, etc. and live them do the job on their own. Or you can just ask them how long do they think a particular job task will take. If they come up with an extensively long deadline you can continue asking why until they et all the points clear and set up a realistic deadline that meets also your priorities. Doing that will help you to have more control and will give the fussy person a realistic deadline and meaning why they must finish the work toward this deadline.
IN CONCLUSION:
People with bad habits are not bad at all. They are just different and their habits may significantly differ from your perspective, thinking and planning. Trying to change them by telling or insisting on something is a good way to lose them, but working with them despite the habit they demonstrate and supporting them over the time an help you achieve great results and them understand and change their habits for good
The Human place 