Interpersonal Influence

Interpersonal Influence

Situation: There is a young male co-worker that works with me on various projects and he is bright, aggressive and eager to learn, however he can be at times extremely

abrasive and disrespectful and this alone makes him extremely

difficult to work with. The goal is to influence him to continue to make his solid contributions, but to tone down the manner in which he attacks certain people and get him to see that his abrasive behavior does not achieve more it alienates those with whom we need cooperation and assistance from. We have a meeting in two weeks and we have to get the support of our accounting department in order to get the numbers we need for a presentation. My co-worker thinks the person we have to get this information from is incompetent and lazy, while I would agree with him that she is less than stellar, he is always quick to show his displeasure and lack of patience with her. This usually gets us nowhere and she often responds to his behavior with silence or a huge delay in getting us the information that we need.

Before, The Plan: To initially have a sit down lunch meeting with him, this makes the environment less formal and a little more inviting to discussion. I want to learn where he puts his energy and attention, where his hot buttons are and what makes him confident in his decisions. I want to take this opportunity to make him shine, give him generous credit for some of our wins and demonstrate areas in which I need some additional help and upfront outline areas in which I need his help, not just with my short comings but with his too so that we can be a more successful team. In our discussions I am hopeful he will realize his abrasiveness if not I am going to try and delicately bring it up and suggest ways I can help him through those times. I want him to see this as a team effort so that I can deepen his commitment and collectively come up with action steps that we will both take to achieve our goals. I am going to suggest our first attempt at our collective effort to be used in our meeting with accounting.

After: Our lunch meeting went rather well, he had even taken the initiative to ask me what I thought and what others were saying about his performance to date, which gave me a great window of opportunity to express my concerns about his behavior. Of course I initially praised him for a lot of his good contributions and attributes and when I got to the parts that weren’t so great I tried my best not to make it a personal attack. I commented that at times I get frustrated with the way office dynamics work and I know I show it at times and would intertwine that he too was guilty of this