Managing relationships with your coworkers can often be challenging. You might feel as though you can’t stand the people that you’re working with on a daily basis and it may even feel like it could be time for you to quit your job.
The truth of the matter is that you’re always going to run into people that you will disagree with. Whether it’s your first job or a new career that you’ve entered into, it is important to consider how you can succeed and manage relationships rather than quit at the first sign of trouble.
One of the first steps is understanding why you have a conflict with your coworkers. Considering your own behavior and what affects you most in the workplace can make sure that you will be able to develop a flexible career and a work culture that is understanding of your own emotional intelligence.
According to recent studies in employee behavior from the Levo Institute, 80% of people in the millennial generation in the workforce would consider emotional intelligence to be a significant quality that’s required for career advancement. Hiring managers are also interested in finding new talent for their organizations and people who are able to play a more significant role in leadership with the help of improvements to emotional intelligence.
Your emotional intelligence is the basic ability that you have to evaluate emotions as well as control emotions in yourself. Your ability to use the information on emotions that others have can also be important. As you continue to manage aspects of yourself in the job market including your leadership potential, physical and mental health, and job performance, your emotional intelligence also needs to be heavily regulated for success.
Some of the most common reasons for conflict in the workplace include:
Poor communication
A conflicting leadership style
Stress
Unhealthy competition
Differences in behavioral styles and values
Subjective perception differences
A lack of information leads to efficiency gaps.
How to identify a coworker that you may find toxic
In order to appropriately manage situations within the office, it’s important to identify some of the coworkers in your office that could be making your job more difficult. Identifying some of your toxic coworkers can make sure that you can handle working with them a bit differently.
Toxic coworkers are often people that go behind people’s backs, plagiarize other people’s work, consistently miss deadlines, are extra arrogant or moody in the workplace, and overly criticize other people.
Take stock of some of these qualities in other people and work at adapting to their behavior or identifying root causes for it so that you can work around some of the toxic behavior that these people exhibit. It may be impossible for you to understand the behavior but there are some tactics that you can use to prevent a toxic employee from making your life miserable.
Accepting that there are going to be extremely difficult people in our lives is one of the greatest forms of acceptance that we need to make. Without this form of acceptance, it will be difficult for you to maintain any type of career. It’s possible that you may never be able to figure out a coworker’s motivations but and acceptance of their state of being is important.
The Six A Principals Includes
Acceptance of the coworker; which requires an ongoing commitment and discipline.
The anticipation of their behavior means identifying troubles that may trigger their toxic behavior.
Adjustment to that behavior means finding a way that you can avoid misunderstandings and conflicts or communication.
Attunement is a process of trying something that you can appreciate about the toxic person.
Avoidance is the process of cutting off contact when a person is experiencing toxic behavior.
Application is the final step which involves potentially making a move or making a change to work away from that person when avoidance no longer works.
The process of application and making changes can be one of the most difficult aspects of the Six As and it’s often something that managers need to recognize that there’s an ongoing conflict that is leading to problems with efficiency in the workplace. Finding a beneficial alternative in a conflict could mean working from home or choosing a different office space.
3 things to avoid when managing workplace conflict
There are some people that are simply confrontational and that enjoy conflicts whether they’re in the workplace or in their own personal lives. If you are managing a relationship with one of these people you will need to take an opportunity to keep them from escalating the conflict or impact your career directly. Here are four ways that you could escalate the conflict that should be avoided at all costs:
Don’t post about the person over social media: many businesses have their own social media policy and publishing even anonymous stories about another employee could put you at risk.
Don’t disrupt your colleagues from work: When you begin to disrupt some of your colleagues from work to gossip about another employee this will often make the entire area around the gossip grow inefficient and it will often lead to a chance of the person could retaliate by gossiping behind your back.
Don’t fully ignore office politics: gossip is something that’s going to happen around you but it’s also important to not put up a solid front and completely ignore any office politics. Staying in the loop can be very important to make sure you can maintain relationships with your coworkers. Learning from office politics but keeping things confidential remains very important to keep your job while managing relationships.
Keep some of these ideas in mind regarding the use of interoffice politics and managing toxic relationships with other employees. Contact us today to learn more!