Free Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy by Lynne Eisaguirre

person’s recent birthday, new grandchild, divorce, or whatever was going on in each employee’s life. After that, I never doubted that most of his employees would walk through fire for him.
    how to connect
    Even if your organization fails to join the employee engagement bandwagon, you can launch your own connection campaign. Connecting with people makes it easier to affect their behavior. Connecting with people before things blow up makes the inevitable conflicts easier to resolve. So, there’s clearly a self-serving reason to connect with boors and bozos. It really is worth the trouble! With a few pointers, even the relationshipimpaired can connect. I’ll offer many more ideas throughout this book, but here are a few to get you started:
    1. Start connections early and often : Invite newcomers for coffee, lunch, or a walk. If your new colleague is of
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    04.   How to Connect Even When You Don’t Want To the opposite gender, invite a few people so that your
    noble intentions are abundantly clear. Getting to know people at a personal level before they start to annoy
    you always helps.
    2. Learn to listen well. In our ADD age, just having someone’s full attention is a gift. Even five minutes of undivided attention from someone can lead to more positive interactions. Don’t multitask!
    3. Cultivate compassion . If we try to empathize with what the other person is feeling, we help create connection. Try to remember a time in your own life when you had
    similar feelings or thoughts. As psychiatrist Daniel Stern explains, our nervous systems “are constructed
    to be captured by the nervous systems of others, so that we can experience others as if from within their
    skin.”
    4. relate those similar feelings and thoughts . This helps the other person resonate with your brain. This defines rapport. Rapport includes mutual attention, shared positive feelings, and physical mirroring.
    5. Celebrate. This helps set up the shared positive feelings part of rapport. Take it upon yourself to create small celebrations for completing a sale or a new project and for marking milestones such as a new baby, engagement, or birthday. Bonding during happy times helps us through the sad times.
    6. Understand unwritten rules . Every family, work group, and society has them. There are secrets that we don’t
    tell grandmother, for example, or generic-looking coffee cups that, in fact, belong to the boss. Some people understand these rules and ferret them out instinctively, but just knowing they exist can help. Ask someone for
    help in decoding the unwritten rules when you’re new
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    stop  Pissing Me Off!
    to an organization. Similarly, you might consider giving a new coworker a discreet “heads-up” if you anticipate he or she may commit a faux pas. 7. Learn to read others accurately . Many of us know how to do this instinctively. This includes the art of reading others’ nonverbal cues. For example, if you’ve ever tried to talk to someone who thought that standing with his
    back to you while talking was appropriate, you know
    what I mean. If you aren’t naturally good at reading between the lines, take heart. You’re not alone. There’s actually a name for the inability to read social cues. It’s called dyssemia, and there are books and programs that can help. (See Paul Ekman, Micro Expression Training Tool [METT] in Appendix A of this book.)
    8. Learn the art of presentation and persuasion . It’s one thing to understand how someone feels; it’s another to act appropriately on that knowledge. It can be done,
    however. Books and seminars abound on this subject.
    Take advantage of the information age.
    9. repeat often: We’re all doing the best we can . There are no perfect workers, mates, parents, or children. We’re all, to a greater or lesser extent, the victim of our history, our brain chemistry, our unhealed wounds, and our childhood. Despite this, the majority of people are