"I'm right...Period."
One of our most challenging assignments involved making a way for a particularly recalcitrant Fortune 50 executive to hear constructive criticism, mete out his own and join the team in working toward common goals.
He’s brilliant, but I just can’t work with him. No one can.
Superior technical skills and a very firm personal belief system underscored Bill’s certainty that he was correct in nearly all of his observations about the global manufacturing powerhouse for which he acted as CTO. Others on the team, who in his view failed to match his exceptional intellect or meet his unflinching moral standards, found him disdainful at best. Bill cloaked himself in stony silence during meetings, dismissing invitations to participate with an irritated flick of his wrist, and made a point of having “better things to do” than attending retirement parties, lunches out with his peers and even a required policy training.
Productivity drain
Bill didn’t realize that in addition to being annoying, his stonewalling behavior created a huge drain on other executives’ productivity because they did not have the benefit of his analysis of technology options that could have scaled functions across the global operations of the firm and made their own work more efficient and effective.
What triggered the call
When Bill’s manager brought her concerns to him, he refuted each one with machine gun precision, citing his colleagues’ shortcomings as valid reasons for his behavior. Nothing seemed to pierce his awareness. Not wanting to dismiss someone who had world-class technical skills, strong company loyalty and firm integrity but not sure how much more uncooperative behavior the management team could stand, she reached out for help.
The path to progress
Bill was every bit as uncooperative during initial meetings with Dr. Fish as he had been with his team. If he had not been afraid of losing his job (a realistic fear), he likely would have refused to attend the debrief of 360º responses. He participated reluctantly, sighing loudly and rolling his eyes through a personality assessment, examination of performance strengths and gaps, review of performance evaluations and a life history interview.
Bill’s life history and personality assessments proved key in this situation. The former revealed serious family issues that had required Bill to fend for himself in his childhood, shaking off naysayers and criticism to press forward, however imperfectly, toward educational goals that would provide the security that his family could not.
The personality assessment provided a surprise breakthrough in Bill’s understanding when two of its findings—that Bill was highly vigilant and distrustful and often skeptical of others’ intentions and that he had a strong need to appear calm and in control—mirrored the feedback given by his colleagues in 360º assessments nearly identically. The assessment tool’s objectivity and the neutrality of its findings helped Bill see that, like everyone else, he is a mixture of traits that are neither negative nor positive but that can be used negatively or positively.
He nearly walked out…
Bill did not achieve a eureka moment simply by reviewing his life history and personal assessment, however. His breakthrough came only after several months, after a deep, trusting relationship grew between him and Dr. Fish, providing a safe place for revelations to occur. Those revelations, in turn, required Dr. Fish to strongly challenge his perceptions, which he could not have tolerated were that trust relationship not fully developed. It was difficult for Bill to resolve the dissonance between who he had thought of himself as for many years—someone who was unerringly right and morally superior—and the less flattering evaluations proffered by his colleagues. At one point, his frustration nearly propelled him out of a meeting with Dr. Fish.
But he walked toward his problems instead
With encouragement from Dr. Fish, Bill drew on the integrity and moral values he had cultivated to try to relate to his peers in more productive ways. She helped him build an action plan to repair his relationship with his boss and peers, to learn to hear feedback productively and to meet team members part-way when their behavior did not equal what he had come to recognize were somewhat exalted standards. He practiced seeing positive points in his colleagues’ presentations and tactfully voicing feedback during meetings.
Bill had to work particularly hard to reach out to his boss, who wasn’t his favorite person. Dr. Fish showed him how to focus on shared goals and traits. Both men loved watching professional hockey, were avid gardeners and had children who had just started dating, so Bill started with brief conversations about those topics and worked up to having lunch out with his boss.
His colleagues responded positively to Bill’s new friendliness and cooperation, and Bill drew encouragement from that feedback to reinforce his commitment to shape new behavioral habits.