Comebacks at Work

Kathleen Kelley Reardon, Christopher T. Noblet

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062083685
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

A stimulating, thought-provoking book that lets you know how to break free of negative behavior, take control of office politics, and prevent difficult, repetitive, and avoidable situations. Reardon—a frequent HuffingtonPost contributor and professor at the Marshall School of Business—arms readers with the tools they need to take control of conversations in the workplace. Comebacks at Work combines the best qualities of Deborah Tannen's Talking from 9 to 5, Kerry Patterson's Crucial Conversations, and Douglas Stone's Difficult Conversations, a perfect workplace guide to getting what you deserve.

Chapter One
Why Communication Matters

Before moving on to look specifically at comebacks, it’ll be useful to take a few minutes to talk about how communication works and why it matters. That is the foundation for all that follows, and the best place to start is in our brains, where the thoughts we communicate, poorly or well, originate.

Science has provided substantial evidence for the neuroplasticity of our brains. We now know, for example, about the human brain’s considerable capacity to adapt to change and to compensate for accident or illness. There are pathways that can be forged by a threatened brain that were never used before or, for that matter, that didn’t even exist. But we’ve also learned that in the absence of such threats, our brains will often go merrily along, operating on a small percentage of their capacity. An unprovoked or lazy brain—which most of us have—doesn’t reach beyond its comfort zone. And that’s exactly how many of us communicate.

A lazy brain affects our communication in negative ways. Far fewer interaction pathways are identified and utilized. When we don’t provoke ourselves to learn creative ways of handling difficult situations, we fall into patterns and consider them adequate. If you have a lazy brain, you may either avoid conflict or slip into argumentativeness at the slightest hint of criticism. Or maybe you incline toward acting in the same way over and over with certain people, and then see problems as their fault. We all engage in some of these and other types of dysfunctional patterns. These patterns are a good part of the reason why comebacks don’t come easily to most people.

Communication is less about what somebody says to you than about how you receive that message and what you do about it. If you try to think of communication in terms of a game of chess, your responsibility becomes clear. In chess you don’t just let the other player lead you around the board, or play the game the same way over and over even though you’ve lost each time. If you want to start winning, you do some leading and strategizing yourself. With practice, you come to see that each of your moves limits your opponent’s further options, just as his moves limit yours. Both of you have “input” into the outcome. The person who abdicates his part of that input almost always loses.

While we don’t tend to think of most types of communication in terms of victories and defeats, effective communication does require strategic involvement. It’s a matter of learning over time, by trial and error. And to the extent that you haven’t been learning and practicing comebacks, your job and career can suffer.

Consider, for example, the experience of Stephen Kepler, a chemical-industry communications manager who was attending a meeting with two senior managers and the vice chairman of his company. Problems had arisen with how some sensitive information had been made public. Before the communications manager could even open his mouth to speak, a senior vice president known for his fierce temper proceeded to, in Kepler’s words, “rip me up one side and down the other for failing to get the proper approval to release the information.” The senior manager continued his assault for what seemed like an eternity. He pointed at Kepler, pounded on the table, and then waved a copy of the offending material inches from Kepler’s nose.

Kepler might have defended himself immediately. Instead, he sat silently, intensely uncomfortable, his blood pressure rising. He hardly blinked as he bore the angry onslaught. He made himself hold back. Finally, after tossing Kepler’s way a few more insults, a look of disgust, and a final re-insistence that he should have gotten approval before releasing the sensitive information, the senior vice president stopped speaking and simply glared, waiting for an abject apology. Instead, Kepler looked straight-faced at the executive, placed a hand on the document that had been waved with such incivility moments before, and simply said: “I had the approval.” Then he opened the document and pointed to the signed approval.

If you had been Stephen Kepler what would you have done? Would you have interrupted the executive early on in his rant? Kepler chose not to take that course. He did not cower, nor did he allow his facial expression to reveal the range of intense emotion he’d been feeling as people who could decide his future at the company watched his career seem to derail before their eyes. Kepler could have shouted back at the irate senior manager who was so full of himself and his power. He might have interrupted the SVP with a clever remark, actively showing him up for a loud buffoon. However, instead of humiliating his attacker, he let that person humiliate himself.

Later that day, the vice president actually apologized to Kepler for the treatment he had undergone at the meeting. Kepler graciously accepted the apology and returned to his work. Not long afterward, he had to work again with the SVP who’d unfairly berated him. Interestingly, that man appeared to have learned something from the way Kepler had coolly and evenly handled what could have been a devastating experience with long-lasting consequences. The two of them ultimately found a way forward by putting the issue behind them.

Not everyone could have appeared as patient and confident as Stephen Kepler. In fact, most people would have reacted much earlier, and more strongly. Observing that his attacker was way out of line, and sensing he was being used as a scapegoat, Kepler had no qualms about letting his attacker dig an ever larger hole for himself. His comeback was masterful not only because of its timing and restraint, but also owing to the calmness with which it was delivered.

Compare this to a similar meeting that took place at an insurance company on the other side of the country. Public relations project managers Paul Romano and Linda Bromley were working on an assignment for one of the company’s product divisions—a project that was running into some problems and obstacles. They sat down for a progress review with Allison Werner, a team member from the product division, as well as with Allison’s VP boss and the division’s senior VP. Fairly new at the company, Romano had never before met either of these senior managers.

No sooner had the meeting gotten under way than Werner launched into a vehement diatribe, blaming every difficulty on the PR department. She said, “They’re not getting the material to us on time, so we can’t get anything done.” She continued in this vein, taking none of the responsibility, and building up a head of steam.

Romano stopped her in her tracks. “I didn’t let her go for a minute after she got rolling,” Romano told me. “My blood pressure was up and I was showing it. My face must have turned completely red. I put my arm out to stop her and then insisted emphatically, ‘That’s not true!’” Werner was stunned. She hadn’t expected someone to return an attack on her turf in front of her bosses. “I was sure,” Romano recalled, “that she expected me, a newbie, to keep my mouth shut and take my medicine.” “Why didn’t you?” I asked. He told me, “I’m just not that kind of person. I wasn’t about to sit there and let her tell lies about my work.”

Romano turned to the senior executives and explained that PR had been getting the materials to Werner’s division on time and in accurate form. Indeed, he told them, it was her division holding things up. “It’s not something I’d ever done before,” Romano said. “But I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m not taking this,’ and I didn’t. Maybe if I’d known the senior execs, I would have rolled my eyes, or done something like that, but she’d gone from teammate to enemy in two seconds flat. I wasn’t going to sit there and take that.”

Over the following years, Romano worked with the senior executives, and his comeback hadn’t damaged his standing with them. He even worked a couple of times with Werner. She remained “distant and cautious,” Romano remembered. “But she never gave me any more trouble.” He added, “From that point I never let anyone inaccurately and publicly challenge my work. They wouldn’t get ten seconds into it before I’d say, ‘Hey. That’s not true.’”

As his career continued, Romano was usually the low guy on the totem pole in meetings. He tended to be with the CEO and other high-status people but he told me, “ I never stood still for public pillorying even from them.”

These are two similar stories, with important differences. Kepler waited, as difficult as it was, to calmly deliver his comeback. Romano responded immediately. In both cases, they knew they were right. They knew they were being used to deflect blame away from their detractors. One was a “newbie,” the other well along in his career, though not yet a senior manager. They both could have ruined their careers in their respective companies on the spot. Instead, because of their conviction, manner of delivery, and the way their comebacks suited their different personal styles, each benefited from saying what he knew to be true, albeit at different points in time in the conflicts.

These kinds of public insults happen sooner or later to people at work, and it doesn’t matter if that work happens to be singing in the church choir. If you don’t know how to respond effectively to situations in which your character or ability is hung out to dry, you’re going to get burned.

That outcome is going to become less and less likely as you read the following chapters. Just knowing that there are many ways to respond to the people with whom you work, and to the situations you face is a big step forward in itself. As you become aware of obstacles in your path and begin removing them, comebacks will come to you more naturally, and people will begin to think twice before making you their target.

Chapter Two
Getting Started

Unless you’re very fortunate, many of the types of scenarios below have happened or will happen to you at work:

You offer a suggestion and once again a colleague dismisses it as something tried before that won’t work now.

Your boss is clearly wrong, but she is rarely receptive to criticism or advice.

At an after-work social gathering you’re asked personal questions about your salary and the cost of your home.

You walk into a meeting and the person who’s after your job quips, “Look who decided to join us.”

You’ve hired a talented person who seems to be mistaking your professional admiration for something more.

An idea you introduce gets no traction until it’s introduced a half hour later by someone who treats it as his.

Your boss assigns you yet another thankless, dead-end task.

Just at the moment when you are making an important point, a detractor cracks a joke at your expense.

Your name is mysteriously left off a report on which you did a lot of work.

Countless people drive to work each day wondering whether they’ll be facing situations like these. They worry that they’ll be caught off guard, taken for granted, used, abused, or cornered. They know how to do their basic jobs well, and even expertly, but they haven’t learned what to say and do to save those jobs and their credibility when they’re put on the spot. When things get tough, such people experience the awful feeling that they are losing control and their careers are sinking.

What do you say, for example, if your boss tells you that you’re extremely accomplished but adds, “We don’t see you as having leadership potential”? This happens often, and most people don’t know what to say. They think, as one senior executive shared with me, “I don’t know how he can say that. After all, I’ve done so much more than he has in my career. Besides, what was he talking about, anyway? What does he mean by ‘leadership potential’? He can’t lead to save his life, yet he’s my boss!”

When comments about “leadership potential,” or some other supposedly valued but vague or undefined concept, are made to diminish someone, they often have little connection to reality. There’s no use torturing yourself looking for the logic because it’s likely not in the words themselves. It’s important to realize that a comment about a lack of leadership potential can be another way of saying, “We don’t think you’re a good fit” or “We don’t want to promote you because you’re not one of us.” So pulling your hair out and struggling to find the logic in such a comment or listing all the reasons why you are a good leader is not likely to be productive.

I learned early in my career that arguing whether or not something is fair at work is usually a waste of time. Many good, responsible people grow up valuing certain ways of being and acting that are easily trumped at work by the often supposed importance of a collective mission. “We’re running a business here, not a charity” and “It’s not personal, it’s business” are used to justify unfairness in many organizations. For those who want to get rid of someone or justify refusal of a promotion, there’s always, “We don’t see you as a team player.” It works even if they hired you to work alone in a cubicle all day because common wisdom in business places a higher value on teamwork than individual needs or concerns. Here I might mention that this rule is, of course, often not applied when it comes to determining the salaries and perks given to senior management. And so, as I said, most of the time it’s not really a rule; it’s an excuse for treating someone unfairly.

What should you say to such work “truisms”? That depends on a number of things, including your relationship with the person who said it, and whether you’re the only two people present. Rather than say nothing and walk away with steam coming out of your ears, why not ask for more detail? For example, “What would you say is the most important characteristic of a team player?”

Questions are used as comebacks far less often than they should be. We’ll look at this more closely later on. For now, it’s good to know that when in doubt about what’s actually being said, or to buy some time, questions are very useful. They make the other person do some work. They prevent you from walking away from a capricious label without having expressed at least some discomfort or resistance.

Here are a couple of possible responses to the accusation of lacking leadership potential:

“It would be instructive to know which specific leadership attributes got you where you are today.”

“Some people are commanding leaders. I prefer not to lead that ...