4. Surviving the office jerk: 3 ways to keep your cool
The Rewired for Good podcast | Episode 4 | 22 October 2024
Notes
Working in the humanitarian sector can feel like juggling flaming torches—tight deadlines, endless deliverables, and life-or-death stakes. And then, enter the office jerk. These difficult colleagues can leave us feeling frustrated, demotivated, and sometimes ready to toss in the towel. Let’s face it, dealing with them is a massive drain on our time, energy, and mental space, often leading to stress, burnout, and a real hit to our quality of life—and impact. When that office jerk strikes, emotions run high, and staying calm and true to your values? Yeah, not always easy.
But don't worry! In this episode, you'll get:
A short exercise to talk yourself off the roof when you feel like you're losing your mind
Tips for setting effective boundaries like a pro
Three mindset shifts to help you reframe the drama and think more clearly.
Transcript
Alright, alright, alright aid workers, how is the week treating you so far? Let me tell you, I've had a week of not walking my own talk. I feel like I've been caught in an avalanche of sudden deliverables that came out of nowhere and I have actually not managed my mind the way I like to. It's just been one of those weeks.
Today, I want to talk to you about one of the topics that aid workers bring to coaching sessions the most. The office jerk. Everyone has an office jerk. There's always that one person whose entire mission seems to be to make your life a living misery. They come in all genders, all ages, all nationalities, all cultures, all shapes and all duty stations.
And for the purposes of this episode, I had a little bit of fun and I went ahead and developed a typology based on what my co-cheese have experienced, what my humanitarian friends tell me regularly, and of course my own experience. And I do want to say before I get deeper into this that I'm only addressing here the people who don't do egregious things, like not people who do proper sexual harassment, not people who bully openly, not the thieves.
Not the people who openly behave against the organization's code of conduct, because those are actually slightly easier to handle. There's like texts and frameworks and you can use those to fight them and take them to HR. But this episode is about the people who are a little bit harder to handle because what they do is so subtle and kind of relentless and it's death by a thousand paper cuts basically.
So I've grouped them in five categories, there's probably more, please help me complete my list if you feel that it's lacking.
For me there's the Power Tripper who seems to get off on putting everyone else down, they don't bother giving you constructive feedback, they redo your work entirely as if you were unable to handle it yourself, they love telling you what to do even though no one gave them that power, you know who I'm talking about.
Then there's the Passive A-hole who refuses to be helpful as a matter of principle, it seems. They just won't answer your emails, they won't answer your requests, they won't say no, they just won't answer and you'll be left waiting like an idiot.
Then you have the Eternal Victim, whose shortcomings are remarkably always someone else's fault. They have an answer for everything and the gaslighting here is of a different world.
You can have also the Usurping Waste of Space, who can't be bothered to do what they're paid to do, but in meetings they become the chief BS officer and they take credit for the work of others.
And then you have the Boundary Violators, who simply haven't received any of the memos of the past two decades on email etiquette, what constitutes a decent time to send a request, they make totally inappropriate gender or racial comments, they're just completely oblivious. It's like their software hasn't gotten updated.
So that for me is a bit of a mapping of the cream of the crop, office jerk archetypes. It's not comprehensive, of course, there's subtleties, but it encompasses most of the common issues we face.
And this is a problem because there's no roadmap for dealing with them. There's no office life regulation that can decisively pinpoint their behaviors as harmful and it's really difficult to swallow often because of a history or a context. So someone who would read an email written by that person, for example, would not immediately see the reason why it's upsetting you, you know, and you're super worked up and you feel super isolated and it just sucks so much. And it hampers your productivity, your ability to focus, to deliver your best.
It's really, I think, a really big problem in the humanitarian sector. I've seen people resign because of the power of office jerks. I've seen some of the best humanitarians I've encountered be reduced to tears and just sobbing from the helplessness that they felt. This is a serious issue and that's why I want to talk about it. I don't want the best aid workers to leave a crisis because some of the worst jerks are winning. Let's put an end to that.
Now the shifts that I want to offer you today can work if the jerk is above you or below you or on the same rank as you. There's some caveats, of course, when reporting lines are involved, but overall all of this applies. Now there's one fundamental assumption and truth that we are going to be operating from here and that's that we can't make another adult behave the way we want, we can't. I've tried, I failed. I've had to come to that realization.
But it's very, very important that we manage our minds when we are being triggered by someone and that you don't let someone else's behavior decide on yours, basically. Because when your emotions run high, intelligence tends to just run a little bit lower. And so we find ourselves writing an email that we would have preferred not to write, or we give the wrong answer in a really public meeting. Or you will just burst out crying, which has also happened to me.
So this is what this episode is about: managing your brain, not about forcing someone else to do things differently, because that to me is mission impossible. The tactics I'm gonna offer are not tactics to defeat the enemy. My goal here with every episode of this podcast is to empower you to dismantle problems, to prevent escalations.
It's not because I'm a saint. It's not because I'm like all peace and love. It's because my main goal as your virtual podcast coach is to help you protect your wellbeing. And from experience, the best way to achieve that is for you to behave in ways that you can be proud of that are aligned with your values. And that involves acting professionally and morally at all times.
So the first thing that you are going to want to do is uncover or map out. The space, the narrative that this person occupies in your brain. If they're your office jerk, they're likely responsible for a lot of ruminations.
So grab a pen, grab a paper, pause this episode and write immediately the longest possible list of everything you hate about them. Everything. Uncensored. What they do, what they don't do, what they should do. All of it. Pause the episode. Do it now. Pause. That is such a cathartic exercise, letting all that rumination on paper and just liberating your brain from it.
Then you're going to look at that list and you're going to circle all the things that in all honesty, you also do sometimes be honest to be super, super honest with yourself. So for example, if you wrote, he complains a lot, if you happen to complain, sometimes you have to circle that. If you wrote, she never answers my emails on time. Same thing. Have you ever not answered an email for whatever reason in a timely fashion? Then you get to circle that. If you wrote, he gives feedback in a really aggressive and humiliating manner. Then maybe you've also given feedback in not the best way possible. Sometimes circle it. If you wrote, she interrupts me all the time, scan your life, figure out if that's something you happen to do occasionally. And if you do circle it.
It's like an exercise that helps unveil the common humanity and imperfection that we share with everyone, including the people actually who irk us the most. And that process alone has really allowed me to sit back from an ongoing open conflict at work and see the other person's behavior in a much less irritating, much more understandable way.
The second thing that you can do is build a mini strategy for boundaries. Boundaries is a word that gets thrown around a lot. I work a lot on this with the humanitarians that I coach. Everybody has a different definition and understanding of it. And I'm going to give you the one that I got from my teacher. I'm forever grateful for it. I'll probably do a full episode on this because it's a big issue, but this is the gist.
You pick one or two of the most unacceptable behaviors of this person. Do they raise their voice? Do they send emails late at night? Do they take credit for the work you did? The boundary is not going to be about what they should do instead, but what you will do if and when they do that behavior, right? Because we're gonna, again, we're assuming that we can't control what people do. We can't, we just can't. What we can control is what we will do.
And for the boundary to be effective and not blow up in your face:
- it has to be a protection of you, not an attack of them
- it has to be communicated to them somehow in writing or verbally like dear, whatever, I can see that we're not on the same page regarding ABC. I will have, you know, that this is not acceptable to me. And the next time you do it, I will X, Y, Z. Thank you for understanding. Right. So you have to communicate it.
- And you have to follow through without fail.
So here are some examples. If someone elevates their voice, you can walk away. You can hang up the phone. You can refuse to answer their queries.
If someone interrupts you in a meeting, you can continue to talk as if they hadn't spoken, for example. Or you can stop speaking and stare at the wall and make it very obvious that this happened. Or you can politely tell them that you were not quite done talking.
If someone gives you feedback in an aggressive manner, you can refuse to implement it until they use a different tone. You can write back saying thank you for the feedback, with which I agree, though I regret the tone with which it was delivered.
As long as you stay professional, as long as you stay polite, as long as you stay in your own power of self-protection, you'll be fine. And this is groundbreaking work. I have implemented it, I have watched my co-cheese implemented, it is just knowing how to set and hold boundaries is the skill of the century.
I want to finish with a third and final thing that I want to offer you. It's a few thoughts that you can borrow in case you find them helpful.
The first one is, for me, I'm very certain that no one, no one, not even the biggest monsters of history, no one goes to bed thinking that they're the bad guy. That thought has helped me so many times de-escalate my crazy little mind when I was angry at someone. It helps me see why someone may be behaving the way they do, and it has helped also several of the people I work with. A lot of times, it's just insecurity that forces people to behave the way they do. They have no clue. It's just their way of handling their version of imposter syndrome or whatever they have going on, right?
And as a disclaimer, I wanna say, I'm fairly certain that I have been someone's office jerk, not once, not twice, but at least probably four times. And you know, I can assure you, I never went to bed thinking, ha ha, I'm the bad guy. I'm, you know, I, I never intended to be anybody's jerk. I'm not easy. And more often than not, I make a ton of mistakes. I handle things poorly, but I always went to bed convinced that whatever I was standing for was the right thing and finding a lot of excuses for why I didn't handle it properly, right? So I really, really love that thought. No one goes to bed thinking they're the bad guy. It really puts things into perspective.
Another thought that I wanna share here is that if this person behaves like a jerk, you're probably full of reasons not to think they're awesome, right? And so my invitation is that you stop giving so much emotional power to someone you don't think is that great to begin with. You're better than that. Let them be whomever they wanna be. They don't deserve to have the power to influence your well-being.
And another belief that I'll end with, in case you want to borrow it, is that jerks don't exist. It's not a thing. People are just people. They're good sometimes. They're crappy sometimes. Maybe this guy who is your worst nightmare is also the best dad ever. Maybe this woman who doesn't know how to give feedback nicely was raised by a very rough mom and then she's volunteering at a soup kitchen religiously every weekend. I don't know.
I mean, this theory has gaps. We're certainly watching history displays some pretty awful human behaviors lately, but I find it reassuring to not think that the people who surround me are fundamentally jerks and that there's nothing that can be done about it.
There you have them. My friends, those are my three favorite ways of handling the people that I find difficult in the workplace. I vomit on paper everything I think about them. It feels so good.
And then I take a little bit of time to notice the places where I'm just as imperfect as them.
Then I develop a boundary strategy that is about the only thing that I can control, which is what I will do if they continue their behavior. I look to protect myself without attacking them. I verbalize it and I do my utmost to follow through. Super important.
And then I have those little thoughts on the shelf of my mind that I can grab onto whenever I have trouble stopping my ruminations. "No one goes to bed thinking they're the bad guy" is a top performer for me and for the aid workers that I coach.
Thank you for listening. Let me know if there's something you'd like me to cover.
I'll be back next week.
Until then, take very good care of yourself.