Creating a Drama-Free Workplace

The Insider's Guide to Managing Conflict, Incivility & Mistrust

Anna Maravelas

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781632657756
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Conflict Resolution

"Maravelas is the best source on workplace irritability and tension." —Matt Villano, New York Times

The human longing for respect and dignity is deep and pervasive. Yet, while resolving more than 300 workplace conflicts, author Anna Maravelas has met thousands of individuals struggling with tension and mistrust.

Creating a Drama-Free Workplace contains strategies to avoid and reverse these troubling trends. Learn why trust and connectedness slip through our fingers despite our yearnings for workplaces that are grounded in collaboration and success.

Stop common missteps before they walk out the door with your most valuable assets—trust, morale, and productivity. You can create the environments you desire and deserve with these proven skills grounded in neuroscience.

In this book you will learn how to:

• Take the drama out of disagreement and enhance your ability to problem solve.
• Eliminate the 5 root causes of workplace tension.
• Be hard on the problem and soft on the people and create lasting alliances.
• Preserve your integrity by talking to people rather than about them.
• Replace bitterness about the past with a shared responsibility for the future.

Knowing how to transform conflict into collaboration affects the outcome of every interaction, challenge, and opportunity.

1

Self-Defeating Habits of Otherwise Brilliant People®

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more
complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius,
and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.”

—Albert Einstein

When goals go awry, the temptation to blame others is a plucky con-artist that insidiously weaves itself into the fabric of our workplaces. Often, with the implicit support of our organizations, “us vs. them” mentalities walk out the front door with our most precious assets: trust, morale, talent, and productivity.

In the following pages, you will find step-by-step strategies for avoiding, or extracting yourself from, conflict-driven drama and hostility in the workplace.

We are painfully aware that positive energy is diminishing in our society and world, and loneliness is on the rise. The workplace is somewhat shielded by societal trends, but it is not immune, and many of us experience a steady erosion of good-natured camaraderie at work. As one client put it, “Relationships aren't what they used to be.”

Hostility, stress, and depression are on the rise

Whenever anxiety and stress dominate a society, self-righteous indignation, irritability, and blame beckon with the false promise of relief.

If we fail to stem the tide of disrespect, our collective future is frightening. Imagine a society that becomes more and more dominated by hostility, rage, incivility, and mistrust.

Many individuals are resigned to increased hostility in our world. Perhaps civility and respect is passé, old-fashioned, or a remnant of a more innocent time that we'll never see again. But no reasonable person wants this trend to continue.

With skill and courage, we can make our workplaces a haven from, rather than an extension of, escalated conflict, incivility, and disrespect.

If you adopt and practice the strategies in this book, you'll experience a decrease in anger and depression, benefit from better health and resiliency, hone your ability to painlessly resolve tough issues, preserve alliances that are critical to your career and well-being, and create a legacy of achievement, integrity, and respect.

What we will cover falls into three broad categories:

1. The necessity of positive energy at work, including how to:
   • Protect your health and well-being from the corrosive effects of incivility.
   • Lower your stress levels.
   • Create experiences of connectedness, which is an indispensable source of energy at a cellular level.
   • Win the performance and emotional lottery.
2. Insights into the causes and cures of the current hostility dilemma, including:
   • How to build life-long alliances rather than turning hurting, insecure colleagues into adversaries.
   • The benefits of being hard on the problem, soft on the people.
   • When we're most vulnerable to the bright lights of contempt.
   • Why people and personalities are usually not the root cause of conflicts and where to focus instead.
3. Specific strategies, including how to:
   • Transform ugly, toe-to-toe confrontation into a side-by-side search for solutions.
   • Avoid being drawn into adversarial factions.
   • Use reciprocity in your favor and turn Cycles of Contempt into Cycles of Courage.
   • Change the trajectory of blame-based conversations.
   • Open the dialogue with a 96 percent chance of a positive outcome.

The daily blitz of aggravations and frustrations is part and parcel of modern life. Our lives are so saturated with stress that if we do not consciously decide how to react, our nervous and cranky brains quietly determine who we become, and how we are seen by others.

The price of contempt

Although workplaces do not have a line item for the costs of contempt, the price tag is cold, hard cash. In one of the following chapters, we'll look at a case study in which the principles outlined in this book saved the organization millions of dollars.

When mistrust contaminates interactions between people or departments, collaboration stops, problem-solving becomes biased, information is distorted, conversations become malicious, and speculation slants to the negative. When teams becomes obsessed with building invisible walls, opportunities for improvement and growth are abandoned. Self-oriented behavior becomes the norm. Paranoia replaces passion, cynicism replaces commitment, fear dulls enthusiasm and pride. When being visible is too big of a risk, creativity and innovation suffer. Employees lay low and dig in.

To my knowledge there isn't a comprehensive index of hostility levels by industry, geography, or across time. However, you can review statistics on costs and causes of negativity in society and workplaces by skimming a list of discrete, but related, findings.

Climate change, anxiety, depression, and anger

• The World Negative Experience Index compiled by Gallup and based on 1,000 interviews in 147 countries, tilted more negative in 2017 than in the last decade. The index tracks people's experiences of stress, anger, sadness, physical pain, and worry.
• Two hundred million individuals will be displaced due to climate change by 2050, in essence becoming “ecoimmigrants” (Fritze et al., 2008).
• G. Albrecht coined the term “ecoanxiety” to describe the chronic or acute reaction to climate-related loss of property, community, social ties, identity, and place.
• Worldwide, suicides are ranked as the second leading cause of death among young adults aged fifteen to twenty-nine, with 804,000 suicide deaths occurring worldwide in 2012, according to the 2018 World Health Organization report.
• 54 percent of respondents in forty nations believe climate change is a very serious problem, according to a Pew Research Center report published in April of 2016.
• As the world warms, frustration and aggression increases, which results in more anger and violent crimes (Ranson, 2012).

Loss of well-being in the United States

• Twenty-nine percent of Americans believe that an armed rebellion might be necessary in the near future to protect their liberties from government intrusion (Cassino, Jenkins, 2013).
• Nineteen percent of Americans suffer from anxiety disorder, and an estimated 31 percent of US adults experienced an anxiety disorder at some time during their lives according to a 2017 study by the National Institute of Mental Health (US).
• A 2017 Gallup poll found that 67 percent of lower-income Americans personally worry “a great deal” about hunger and homelessness. In middle-income and upper-income families, the figures are an astonishing 47 percent and 37 percent, respectively.
• Forty percent of American families reported that they struggled to meet at least one of their basic needs (health care, housing, utilities, or food) during the last year (Karpman, Zuckerman, and Gonzalez, Urban Institute, 2018).
• Approximately 40 percent of Americans are “perched on the edge” with vast numbers of middle-class Americans saying they would be unable to cover an unexpected $400 expense. Despite fears of idleness, Philip Alston, the author of the UN study, found that only 7 percent of benefits recipients (i.e., Medicaid) are not working. The majority receiving benefits are working full-time jobs, in school, or giving full-time care to others.
• The percent of elderly (aged sixty-five and older) filing for bankruptcy showed a two-fold increase, and an almost fivefold increase in the percent of older people in the bankruptcy system. Of all Americans filing for bankruptcy, older filers rose from 2 percent in 1991 to 12 percent in 2018 (Thorne, Lawless, and Foohey).
• According to a 2018 American Psychiatric Association study, 68 percent of Americans felt “anxious” or “extremely anxious” about “keeping myself or my family safe” and that 39 percent of Americans feel more anxious that they did a year ago.
• In the United States, suicides increased 28 percent between 1999 and 2014 and were the second leading cause of death for young people aged ten and thirty-four in 2016. There were more than twice as many suicides as homicides, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• Nearly half of Americans (47 percent) report feeling alone or left out, and 43 percent feel their relationships are not meaningful and feel isolated from others. Based on interciews with 20,000 US adults, the loneliest Americans are eighteen to twenty-two years old, according to the 2018 “Cigna US Loneliness Index.”
• The Southern Poverty Law Center found 954 hate groups operating in the United States, close to an all-time high since they started monitoring nearly thirty years ago, including a 22 percent increase in neo-Nazi groups from the previous year, as reported in their 2017 data.
• Hate crimes in general rose more than 17 percent in 2017, the third straight year that such attacks have increased, according to data released by the FBI. Law enforcement agencies reported it was the biggest increase in more than a decade.
• Road rage involving a firearm doubled between 2014 and 2016, from 214 incidences to 623 according to Trace, a nonprofit news organization (Biette-Timmons).
• Approximately two-thirds of driving fatalities involve aggressive driving (Goodwin et al., 2015, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration).
• More than 78 percent of US drivers admitted to aggressive driving in a 2014 study by AAA. In a survey of more than 2,700 drivers, almost 4 percent exited their vehicles to confront another driver, and 3 percent (57 million in the last year) admitted to bumping or ramming another vehicle on purpose.

Incivility at work

• In a Pan-European opinion poll, 59 percent of respondents report that one of top three workplace stressors was being “subject to unacceptable behaviors such as bullying or harassment” (European Agency for Safety at Work–EU-OSHA, 2013).
• Ninety-eight percent of individuals have reported experiencing rude behavior in 2011, and half said they were treated rudely at least once a week, up from a quarter in 1998. Eighty percent lost work time worrying about the incident, 66 percent said their performance declined, and 78 percent said their commitment to the organization declined (Porath, and Pearson in Harvard Business Review, 2013).
  Incivility usually arises not from malice but from ignorance.

  —Christine Porath
• The vast majority of workplace bullies are bosses (Workplace Bullying Institute, Williams, 2011).
• The impact of rudeness on performance is astonishing. Medical teams (one physician and two nurses) were given a cognitive task in a simulation of diagnosing a seriously ill infant. Half of the teams were interrupted twice by a rude doctor and half were interrupted but without disrespect. The teams that experienced the two rude interruptions had a 52 percent drop in performance compared to the other teams! The disrespected teams overlooked data that was right in front of them, struggled with comprehension, and accessing their working memory (Riskin et al., Pediatrics 2015).
  Even the mild incivility common in medical practice can have profound, if not devastating, effects on patient care. . . . Not only does rudeness harm diagnostic and procedur...