We have all seen the effect a demoralized worker brings to a
workplace. In their increasing
unhappiness, they quickly become the office villain by bringing down the morale
of the entire workplace with their difficult attitude.
I am often brought in to workplaces as a last resort against
the office villain. By the point they
are speaking to me, they are often entrenched in their own bad attitude, certain
that they will always be miserable here and that no one cares about them, so
why should they even bother to try and make things better?
When I see their tight body language and furrowed brow, I
know I am in for a tough conversation.
But this is actually the ultimate opportunity for me, a chance for me to
dig a little deeper into the motivations of the office villain. I ask the office villain to tell me how they
got here, and then I engage my active listening skills. And over the course of our conversation, I
see the body language relax, the brow un-furrow.
Often, I see the entire personality of the so-called villain shift, and
that is where the transformation becomes possible.
When people begin to feel unheard in the workplace, they
also begin to feel undervalued, which quickly leads to them feeling
disrespected. This starts them down a
spiral which ends with them assuming the worst of everyone in their
workplace. The way to begin to turn that
around is to stop them from spiraling and give them an opportunity to be heard. This is exactly what mediation provides: a
successful mediator creates space and opportunity for the office villain to feel
heard, to express exactly why their needs are not being met, and to think about
what could happen differently to allow them to move forward in a way that no
longer creates conflict for the rest of the office.
Simply giving someone the opportunity to be heard is the
first step in taking someone from a destructive spiral to a much more
productive path. It can shake a person
out of their narrow, entrenched mindset and help them to explore different ways
of doing things. Suddenly, the office
villain sees different and more productive ways for them to move forward, and
you can have the conversation about what they can do differently, a
conversation that seemed so impossible before.
