Introduction
When I was in business school, a classmate came to me with a disturbing story about his office. “Some guy, we think we know who it is,” he said, “goes to the bathroom every day, takes a dump, and after he’s done, smears his dirty toilet paper on the door of the stall. A little z pattern. What IS that?”
I received questions about behavior all the time in business school, though I’ll admit this was an unusual one. In a class full of aspiring bankers and hedge funders, I was the psychiatrist. I became the person whom everyone came to with questions … questions about fights between coworkers, about intolerable bosses, about relationships, and, yes, about bizarre behavior. I enjoyed answering them, offering my insight about potential causes, possible solutions, interesting explanations. I looked forward to hearing what anecdotes my classmates would bring me and how my explanations and recommendations were received.
As a psychiatrist, you quickly get used to witnessing all sorts of seemingly extraordinary behavior. You work in psychiatric hospitals, in emergency rooms, in clinics, on the medical floors. You grow accustomed to interacting with people who think they’re immortal, with people who think the devil is after them. Your days are filled with people who try to cut themselves, hang themselves, suffocate themselves. You hear horrendous stories of abuse—sexual and physical—some beyond your wildest imagination of what a person could do. Or endure.
I once had a patient who believed he had a bionic ear implanted by the government, in order to transmit classified information about impeding intergalactic war. Another one who tried to shoot an airplane out of the sky. But, believe it or not, what seems unbelievable can almost become expected. The atypical becomes typical; the horrific can seem routine. Your friends and colleagues are other psychiatrists and psychologists, and everyone has stories like this that fill their days.
Already a psychiatrist when I started business school, I was suddenly surrounded by people who found even commonplace interactions compelling. They were fascinated by their coworkers, and it was fun for me to explain the various permutations of office drama. I loved seeing how bent out of shape they got about people—their bosses, their coworkers, their direct reports—even their spouses. They came to me with tales of people they called real schmucks: those they neither liked nor understood. A quick explanation from me, and they were suddenly very relieved, very grateful. I realized how little people knew about why people acted the way they did and how seemingly simple insights could be extremely effective. Sometimes people wanted to know what to do about a coworker, but at other times they seemed to want to know why the coworker acted a certain way. More than anything, I realized that just a little bit of understanding goes a long way in helping someone empathize and even deal with the schmuck in their office. Going to business school provided an avenue for me to really see what other people said and thought about their work environments. Instead of being surrounded by people who were trained in, worked in, and inundated with understanding and analyzing behavior, I was now the one and only one with that skill set. And I liked it. It was from this experience that I realized just how much I wanted to use those abilities to help others in their workplace environments.
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From those classroom discussions came a career of helping others understand individual and group dynamics at work. While I continued in more typical areas of psychiatry—running locked adult inpatient units and eventually becoming chair of the department of psychiatry at the nation’s oldest hospital—I also combined my mental health experience with business training and those eye-opening classroom discussions. I worked as a consultant assessing entrepreneurial teams for venture capital companies. While in this role, I helped investors make backing decisions by allowing them to better understand the people in the company they were about to invest in and how they functioned together. Ultimately, I offered investment advice that was based on understanding personalities and relationships. In the morning I would see people suffering from schizophrenia, and in the afternoon I would help instruct and manage business, financial, and employment decisions using the same, albeit adapted, skill set of observing, asking, and figuring out what makes people tick.
I also developed a publicly offered “professionalism program” and, in that role, continue to help health care organizations create and maintain professional working environments. I began by consulting within my hospital system but now see individual consultations from all over and make recommendations to others on how to set up similar programs. Much like my function in those early business school conversations, I analyze how workers can better function alongside one another. In efforts to preserve safe and satisfying workplace environments, I assess problematic situations and develop plans to improve their functioning.
In these roles, I aim to figure out how difficult people and disruptive workplace behavior can be best addressed. No matter where people work, they bring their personalities with them, and oftentimes those personalities seriously, negatively affect the workplace environment. Bullying, micromanaging, and being entitled are all common problems at work, but thankfully they are all troubles that can be successfully addressed. Solutions can include everything from coaching to talk therapy for disruptive individuals to structural changes within the workplace environment itself.
As we will see, early and direct intervention really does work best. By the time I see referrals for troublesome behavior, the disruption has progressed pretty far. The smearer, for example, might have found new and even more disturbing uses for his evacuations. No one wants behaviors to get to this point. Instead, his coworkers could have learned to recognize his passive aggressive remarks and figured out what was bothering him before he started smearing feces. And by writing this book, I hope to show readers how to take the important steps toward identifying and rectifying disruptive behaviors before they get too unprofessional, uncomfortable, unsafe, or, in the case of this poor fellow, unsanitary.
And that idea is where the title of the book comes from. So many calls to me quite literally begin with, “I’ve got this schmuck in my office, and I should’ve called you about him ten years ago.” The supervisor often had the unrealistic hope that the bad actor would simply stop causing trouble. But as the problems worsened over time, the supervisor felt increasingly ineffectual and avoidant, and the referral arrived laden with anger and resentment. The individual in question is most often not a schmuck at all. She’s just being herself and no one ever really told her that her ways were causing problems.
The title thus refers to the frustration and annoyance that so many of us feel when we just don’t understand someone or why that person is behaving in a way that doesn’t make sense to us. It’s easy to get angry and label someone a jerk or a schmuck. It’s much harder to try to understand the underpinnings of why he or she approaches the situation that way. But we must try, and in so doing we will learn about our colleagues and ourselves and create a safer, healthier, better-functioning workplace.
Realizing what people do and don’t know about how people function, I realized that I could yet again bring my psychiatric expertise into the workplace. In particular, I began to understand the power that being able to identify types of dysfunction can have in emboldening us to make better workplaces. From those business school discussions to my consulting experience and frequent conversations with friends and family members, I decided to help people understand workplace problems. I want people to know why the workplace can become disruptive and what can be done about it.
Just as disruptive behavior can and does show up anywhere and everywhere, this book can and should be read by anyone who works with other people. I will explain how interactions among coworkers can become maladaptive by examining the basics of personality traits, their development, and how they contribute to impaired performance and overall stress in the workplace. I will explain how to identify problematic behavior, how to explain it by understanding the personality traits behind it, and how to remedy it. Sometimes this can mean taking a look at ourselves and understanding our own role in creating or maintaining the behaviors. And at times it may mean getting someone help either within or outside the organization.
This approach, however, requires a change in the way we approach disruptions around us. People are uncomfortable with things that are unpleasant—whether fear, sadness, anxiety, or illness—and try to avoid them. That evasion takes many forms. People avoid confronting those who upset them. People avoid bringing up their feelings or stay away from people that make them uncomfortable altogether. People think that systems can’t change, that coworkers won’t listen. People are afraid that they will get in trouble. People feel that they should be expected to endure things that are making them uneasy in the workplace. People think that certain positions of authority allow people to behave inappropriately.
People are wrong.
I’m writing this book to start a conversation. I’m on a personal crusade to get people to talk to one another, directly and honestly. Miraculous advances in technology have improved communication and efficiency tremendously, and yet they have added layers of separation between us. It’s even easier now to avoid things, since there’s a mode of communication customized to everyone’s level of tolerance for intimacy. In many ways, this is great because most people can find a way to comfortably communicate. But we still have conflicts, and they still upset us, and we still need to address them. Oftentimes, conflicts cannot be avoided. Understanding when and how to handle them appropriately is the key to a better workplace for everyone.
In the following chapters, I will make broad generalizations about people and group them accordingly. I will describe anecdotes that you will recognize, because they are ubiquitous. My goal is for you to understand that the associated behaviors are of a type and are usually not driven by malice. There is great benefit in categorizing, because by understanding types, what drives them, and what works best to manage them, you will develop the skills to work well with anyone. This book is not intended to diagnose and no reader will become an expert in psychiatry, but it will give people a way to figure out the people and behaviors around them.
We will cover arrogance, distraction, social inadequacy, obsessiveness, manipulation, and simply weird people. I will suggest strategies for interaction and, if necessary, interventions to improve relationships. Know, however, that people are by no means one-dimensional. We each display many, many types of personality traits, and they all come together to make each of us who we are. These descriptions are not meant to lead you to overdefine or pigeonhole the people around you—they are simply presented to guide you in understanding and handling aspects of your relationships with them. Perhaps most important, in beginning to understand people, you can feel more empathy for their situations and why they may act as they do.
Copyright © 2017 by Jody Foster, M.D., with Michelle Joy, M.D.
