The One Thing You Can Do When Others Aren’t Being At Their Best

You might have the best of intentions to be focused on what’s important during the day and keep a positive attitude . . .

. . . but what do you do when other people are constantly stealing your attention, not meeting your expectations or scaring you a little when you try to say ‘no’?

When you feel like you are always putting other people’s needs before your own, but you don’t know how to say no and make your needs or what’s important a priority.

Or when a colleague or your manager is challenging to work with and you don’t feel heard or valued. They just don’t ‘get it’.

Or when your employee or colleague is not delivering and you are left to pick up the pieces so you can meet a deadline.

You feel frustrated you aren’t getting the results you want. And you’re unsure how to improve the situation.

You seem to have the same conversations over and over (and over) again.

I remember a time back in my corporate career with one particular manager of mine. We seemed to always be butting heads. I pushed his buttons and he pushed mine.

Although we always got the job done, it was quite stressful and I found working for him quite challenging.

I complained more than I’d like to admit and took that stress home with me at the end of the day.

But then I stumbled upon a better way . . .

One day I decided to try a different approach. I stopping trying to push my agenda and my need to be right, and focused on strengthening the relationship and being more empathetic to him.

And you know what? To my surprise, when I came off the defense, he did as well.

We started to build our relationship and projects became a lot easier without that added stress and drama.

And it was much easier for me to have influence my ideas and perspective, when this trust was in place.

I learned one of my greatest lessons of leadership from one of the most unlikely of leaders.

Having trust is what matters most – and this was definitely missing. Neither of us felt had that safety.

I always intuitively knew this, yet seeing the positive results with this ‘difficult situation’ opened my eyes to the possibilities.

This fundamentally changed the way I worked with people, especially those who I felt were more challenging.

It really came down to me changing up my approach. Instead of blame, I shifted my thinking and came from a different angle. And had much better results.

And I saw this with many of my colleagues – they keep on butting heads with others and the same issues keep bubbling up. And it was affecting them personally, feeling frustrated and not sure what to do.

Often, professionals can fall into the trap of blaming other people for poor performance and seek control, or get caught up in the drama of internal politics, rather than really influencing others to deliver what they expect or come to some common ground.

Changing up your approach is one thing you can do when others aren’t being at their best, that’s often overlooked.

While you might not be able to control what’s happening around you, you do have control over your thoughts and actions to get better results. And, you have the ability to positively influence and motivate others (more than you may realize). This has been well proven through leading science and research.

What is one thing you can do to change up your approach when it comes to dealing with a challenging co-worker or your manager to help influence a better outcome? Take action!