What do you get when you cross complex, pressure-filled team challenges with a general fear and loathing of conflict? You get passive-aggressive behavior. Given how stressful and complicated work has become, it’s no surprise that conflicts arise, but what’s destroying our teams is that we never learned how to have conflict in a way that keeps individual egos and fragile team dynamics intact.
If passive-aggressive behavior has taken hold on your team, there is hope. You can take the high road and make it increasingly difficult for your teammates to keep up their backstabbing antics. Check out this quick Right Words to Say Video for the instructions:
Click here to view the video on YouTube | Click here for the full transcript
I thought you might like a handy dandy reminder. With help from the amazing Carole Blades, I’ve turned the tips into a poster. Print it out. Post copies in your meeting rooms. Do what you need to do to stop the insidious passive-aggressive behavior that’s destroying our teams.
Click here to download the poster
A reminder: The Right Words to Say series is for you, so send in your questions and I’ll shoot a video and create a worksheet to help you tackle the challenges you are facing on your team.
Further Reading
How You Can Put an End to Gossip
Are you Lending Support to a Teammate or just Enabling Gossip?
Video: Did You Hear About…?
Very helpful words of wisdom- thank you.
Any advice on how to deal with a passive aggressive boss, in particular?
Hi Jodi, thanks for your comment. A passive-aggressive boss is bad news. I wrote a post about it that you can find here. http://blog.knightsbridge.com/blog/liane-davey—effective-teams/am-i-a-passive-aggressive-boss So, what to do….? With a passive-aggressive boss, you have to do the same things as with anyone, ask if issues can be raised in the room, call out contradictory body language (nicely), ask when decisions seem to be reopened. With the boss, you can also use your 1:1 time to ask great questions “What do I need to know to be more effective?” “How can I better meet your needs?” “How can we get these concerns on the table?” Then just relentlessly go after the bad behavior. Each and every time be pleasant, smile, and call out what you see. Painful, but usually effective. (You might also want to explore other options…life’s too short to work for a passive-aggressive boss!)
I thoroughly enjoy and get a lot out of all of your articles. My company blocks the You-Tube site. Can this material be presented in some other fashion?
Thanks
I had the pleasure of hearing you speak today and leaving a comment (as I said I would!) on yet another awesome blog post. I have shared the blog post with my team because while I think we’re pretty open, it’s so unnatural for us to be comfortable with uncomfortable that it’s easy to fall back into bad patterns. I look forward to hearing their perspectives.