OK, you just read the title of this post. Did it make you think:

1. Excellent, the world could use a little more peace and joy!
2. RUKM? When did this turn into one of those fruitcakey, nouveaux age kumbaya-hoo blogs?
3. Uh, is this post serious? Or is he being sarcastic?

BTW, Urbandictionary.com is your best friend for unknown acronyms which, you should know ahead of time, are generally not scrubbed for polite company. (As you may have noticed, manners are out of fashion today.) Above, RU stands for “are you” and KM stands for “kidding me.” Sometimes people stick an F in the middle, which I understand to be for “fantabulous.”

But I digress.

Rest assured, I’m being totally serious on this point. The world can use more peace and joy, and not just the surface level, feel-good Disney-flick kind of joy. I mean the deep-seated, I’m-in-a-good-place kind of contentment that crowds out fear and let’s you take life by the horns. Too often, people are filled with fear, and all the negativity that fear breeds, such as contempt, jealousy, and frustration, to a level they are not even aware of. Yesterday I wrote about one of the sources of that negativity and the need of managers to account for this when engaging their teams. (I had a comment on HRMToday that suggested maybe some found the post useful… and a comment on this jasonseiden.com that suggested less than 100% penetration.)

So how do you make your workplace “better”?

Let’s assume that of everyone reading this, 1/3 of the people are positive (and chose answer #1 above), 1/3 are negative (and chose #2), and 1/3 could go either way (and chose #3). And they all work for you. How can you successfully engage such diverse groups and bring them all along to a better place?

Here are some suggestions, from holistic to tactical:

1. Recognize that not everyone comes in at the same place. This is critical. You can’t expect everybody to have a good day just because you want them to, emotions don’t work like that. Give people permission to be who they are, and take care to distinguish a passing mood from a sour personality. Cheering someone up is easy, de-bitterifying someone is not. Do what you can, and expect of others as much as is possible, but no more. Ultimately, you’ve got to let others be themselves, and you need to stop yourself from letting your lack of control over others stress you out.
2. Get in front of your own emotions. When you find yourself saying things like “you doesn’t understand,” “you’re not listening,” or “don’t tell me what I’m thinking, nobody knows me better than me,” stop. The problem is you, and you need to walk away for a bit before re-engaging. If this sounds frustrating, trust me, it is. If it sounds like baloney, trust me, it isn’t. Smarter people than I have cracked the code on this one, and the results always come out the same way. What’s got you frustrated isn’t that other person doesn’t understand, it’s that you haven’t done a good enough job articulating the alternative.
3. Identify where people are emotionally on a day-by-day basis. For intuitive people, this may sound like a no-brainer… but for people who lack empathy, this may sound like a big waste of time. Managers: the act of trying to see the world through someone else’s eyes does not mean you automatically agree with them, it means only that you’ve taken the time to listen and understand them; tracking their moods is not synonymous with giving credence to every little ticky-tack he said/she said issue, it means only that you recognize the humanity of the situation. If you do this much, what you are showing is respect, and the other person will pick up on this and will likely respond in kind, even if you ultimately tell them to “knock it off.”
4. When other people seem to be acting crazy, it’s generally because you no longer have any idea what’s really going on. Too often, we pay attention to what others do without realizing that they are sometimes responding to what they see in us. (I had a 360 in which a bear of a manager got glowing reviews from subordinates but got dinged by his peers. I had to explain to him that his subordinates were blowing sunshine at him because they were afraid of what would happen to their jobs if they said anything differently—their responses weren’t genuine, they were reactions to him. Not an easy conversation.)
5. When your directions don’t get followed, assume you communicated poorly and go from there.
6. When using humor, let everyone in on the joke by pointing the finger at yourself.
7. If you find a talented individual being teased and stopping it is beyond your control at the moment, turn the teasing to the positive. “Do you know why you’re catching grief for this? You’re the only person around sometimes who doesn’t seem to know how good you are! How do I convince you that you’re underutilizing your talent?!”
8. Don’t immediately assume that the problem is that people don’t know what to do. Usually, the issue is that people don’t know how to do what they need to do. Remember the story of the Tower of Babble? It didn’t fail for want of engineering expertise! (Can’t you just picture all those project managers haranguing the brick layers on proper technique, when what they needed was an interpreter?)
9. Ask people about them and focus them on the positives. You can talk about work, life, whatever; you’re goal is to take an interest in the person and draw out a talent of theirs. This is called connecting with others. It’s one of the building blocks in a little thing we like to call loyalty.
10. Show optimism and energy.
11. Be honest. Not mean, but honest.
12. Just do. Older generations seem to have grown up in a world where it was expected that a person would have a public persona and a private persona. When discussing issues, it’s not uncommon for Boomers to go through a bit of preamble, during which they seem to be re-establishing the ground rules for dealing with an issue… that’s a communication style wholly unnecessary when dealing with younger generations, who—thanks to TMZ, Facebook, Star Magazine, etc.—have been watching the guy behind the curtain their whole lives. Let your actions speak for themselves. All that preamble does is make you sound like you’re hiding something.
13. Take all blame, give away all credit. If you’re the boss, your team already thinks their smarter than you… and don’t people love it when you agree with them! Giving your team credit shows that you agree with their assessment of you… and costs you nothing. They’ll love you for recognizing their brilliance.

These tips for injecting some positivity into your work environment may sound simple, but implementing them can be incredibly tough. Don’t try to do them all at once. Don’t try to do more than one or two at once! Let me know if it’s worth expanding on one or more of them…

Posted under Team Dynamics, Leadership, How to Self-Destruct