PIHRA Scope - Winter 2008 - (Page 16)

Dysfunction Doesn’t Make Cents By Jill Kohn, Ph.D. Kohn Communications professionals are often called upon to intervene when the behavior of grown-up employees isn’t so, well, grown-up. This article offers three steps to help you better address perfectly legal yet rude, crude and socially unacceptable behaviors that can cripple productivity. HR STEP ONE: CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT THE PROBLEM HR HR professionals hear all kinds of things things about people sent to you for hings help. Most of the time, however, the individual isn’t the ogre they’ve been portrayed to be. However, it’s easy to fall victim to what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. This is the tendency to blame character defects instead of situational defects when something goes wrong. Perceiving the problem in terms of character defects keeps you stuck in the problem because this thinking limits you to only one solution: personality reconstruction! That solution requires the individual spend the better part of a decade in intensive psychotherapy. Who has time for that? Expanding your thinking beyond personality and into situational deﬁciencies will help you to ask different kinds of questions, look for different kinds of causes and bring more effective solutions to the table. While training to become a psychologist, I conducted behavior modiﬁcation groups for perpetrators of domestic violence. It is very easy to fall victim to the fundamental attribution error when addressing this extremely dysfunctional behavior. Looking at the problem through the situational lens, however, leads to different ideas about cause such as lack of self-awareness, lack of awareness of impact on others, lack of education about frustration tolerance and woeful deﬁciency in coping skills. What I came to learn through that work and what I fundamentally believe is this: People are always doing the best they can with what they’ve got. Take, for example, the angry employee, a.k.a. the one in your ofﬁce that everyone is convinced is a psychotic lunatic. This employee yells, screams and ﬂings various heavy objects about his ofﬁce during ﬁts of rage. The easy conclusion to draw is that this person is a jerk. Maybe that’s true. However, following the principle that he or she is doing the best they can with what they’ve got, it leads to a solutionoriented assessment that goes beyond dismissive and unproductive labeling. It leads to the conclusion that the problem (and therefore the solution) rests in addressing what resources the individual t has, not who the individual is. In sum, it is the skill set that needs improvement. Aha! Now we have a way to a solution. We can teach skills to increase self-awareness and, in time, change speciﬁcally identiﬁed behaviors. STEP TWO: FOCUS MORE EFFORT ON THE PERSON IN THE POSITION OF POWER Hp HR professionals are often called upon upon to intervene in a situation that inupon to i volves multiple people and has escalated to the point of crisis. So, the committed HR professional rolls up his or her sleeves and begins to investigate. While these may not be the actual words used, the message communicated to HR goes something like this: “Help me! Help me! My boss is an evil villain. She’s Darth Vader! She is controlling, micro managing, and manipulative. She’s mean. She’s rude. She doesn’t even give me so much as a, ‘Hello. How are you?’ before she starts barking out orders.” Then HR speaks with “Darth,” and hears something like this: FEATURE Winter 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of PIHRA Scope - Winter 2008

PIHRA Scope - Winter 2008 Contents Message from the CEO What’s on the Legislative Horizon in 2009 HR Concepts Dysfunction Doesn’t Make Cents The Three R’s of Environmental Sustainability PIHRA Calendar Scope on the Districts PIHRA’s New Members Index to Advertisers

PIHRA Scope - Winter 2008

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