The Power of Hearing Someone Out: Turning Around the Office Villain

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.

Any comic book series or summer blockbuster will tell you that all villains have a backstory; they were not born that way, but created by choices they made to circumstances their life presented.  The office villain is no different, and mediation allows us to get to those root causes, address the underlying problems and give that former villain a chance to change their office identity.