Years ago I was working in a team, and like in all organisations we had to deal with self absorbed sociopaths screwing things up. The problem was that well meaning incompetents also had the same effect. For us it meant that we would lose our shit with both types of instigators, when the well meaning ones probably needed a bit of help. Although some of them were so incompetent, and caused so much of a mess it was tough to be cool with them.
Anyway when dealing with these situations we ended up asking ourselves. “Are they evil?”. Of course it’s all about context etc, but what we were actually asking was:
“Is this person acting in their own self interest and not considering the impact on others?”
“Does this person care about the impact on others?”
“Is there any merit in what this person is doing?”
What I’ve now learnt about is a thing called Fundamental Attribution Error. Which is, in very simple terms…
The tendency to attribute behaviour to a persons personality rather than the situation.
I feel like this is a really important thing to be aware of. Particularly now when so many of us are working remotely. We don’t have the ability to talk about things over a coffee. We can’t easily read the signals we give when interacting. It’s trickier to understand tone or inference….
These can lead to pretty harsh conclusions..such as “That guy’s a dick”.
When that guy might be really stressed. There’s a ton of reasons why. The type of chats, the ones that we would normally have over a coffee aren’t happening at the moment due to the ongoing zombie apocalypse. Obviously Covid related stresses aside, that guy might be dick. They could very well be a malevolent narcissist.
But they’re probably not. It’s totally possible that they’re stressed, or even that they’re not aware of the behaviour they’re exhibiting.
So maybe take time to ask them how they’re doing. Talk about stuff that’s not work related. Let them talk about themselves.
If they really are dick, you’ll find out. You’ll also find out fairly quickly if they’re incompetent.
But more importantly, if they’re neither of those things, and actually just a human who’s finding this whole situation a bit difficult, then you might have made it a little less difficult.
And that means you’re not a dick ;-)
