In this episode, Perry Holley and Chris Goede explore strategies for working effectively with complicated people. They discuss the importance of seeing individuals as people rather than problems and offer practical tools for fostering collaboration and understanding. They also emphasize the role of clear communication in reducing friction and frustration when working with difficult colleagues. Additionally, they highlight the value of setting boundaries to protect time, energy, and productivity while still maintaining positive working relationships.
Perry Holley:
Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry. Holly a. Maxwell Leadership facilitator and coach.
Perry Holley:
And I’m Chris Cody, executive Vice president. Welcome and thank you for joining. My question for you at the start is how many of you work with complicated people? Well, I am having to do that today, but we’re going to talk a little bit today about can you really work with complicated people? We’re going to give you a little bit of an answer through that and how to do that, but the answer is yes. Obviously that is true. I want you to go to MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast. There you can take a look at the blog that we write that’s tied to each one of these. You can download the learner’s gu. There’s also an opportunity for you to ask any questions or give us topics you’d like for us to unpack in future episodes.
Perry Holley:
Well, as I mentioned, we’re going to talk about can you really work with complicated people? And I think this really hits home with every leader. That’s why I started with the question, because we all work with complicated people. Here’s the thing, if you don’t think you do, you’re probably the complicated person. So we need to talk about this now. We’re not talking about someone that’s toxic, abusive, completely illegal behaviors. That’s a different conversation. That’s hr, that’s legal. We’re actually talking about kind of the.
Perry Holley:
The everyday complexity of people, the quirks that we have, the blind spots that we have, emotional and, you know, insecurities. However that shows up, maybe competing priorities, the stuff that derails team connection, collaboration, and will 100% drain your leadership energy. So, Perry, I know this has been a huge book for you. You’ve loved it. Ryan is a phenomenal communicator. And. And this is an incredible book. So let’s dive into what you want to talk about today.
Perry Holley:
Yeah. So Maxwell Leadership published this, and Ryan’s a good friend and has allowed us kind of got to know him a little bit. And so when I met him at an event we had recently, I. I got the book. It had just come out and I read it, and then I had to let him know that I have a bone to pick with him. It took me about two chapters because you buy the book. If you buy a book like this, how to work with complicated People. You probably got somebody in mind.
Perry Holley:
Yeah, right.
Perry Holley:
Maybe some mini somebody’s in mind. Took me two chapters to figure out. It’s about me. Yeah, it’s about me. So also probably in somebody else’s life. You’re the complicated one in that. What Ryan’s really getting to here is how do we learn to collaborate and work with people different from us, with maybe difficult individuals. And if you do this, it’s transformative, he says, and you can unleash this creativity, strengthen your team, stand out as a leader.
Perry Holley:
I mean, I found it to be incredibly valuable to help me stop thinking about people as complicated people, but think about them as people. But they have some complications with the. How they communicate or how they show up. But I can. I can overcome that.
Perry Holley:
Yeah.
Perry Holley:
Because I. It’s going to come down. I’ll just give it away. It comes down to how do you see people?
Perry Holley:
That’s right.
Perry Holley:
And. But it’s on you. You have a choice to make about that. But I thought maybe we could discuss a couple. He had a couple of cool tools in there and some ideas. And I do recommend the book highly.
Perry Holley:
Yeah, it’s a mindset shift. Do you label that individual as a problem or a person? Like, what do you look like? So if you do. If it’s a problem, it’s going to be an obstacle. It’s going to be. It’s going to be, you know, a major challenge for you. But. Or as a person where. No, they have values.
Perry Holley:
And what are those values? And they have hopes and. And literally they have a history. What’s their history? And. And where they get where they’re at. That whole connection side that we talk about in level two so much is what we’re really talking about looking at this is a person. And how do we understand and. And shift our mindset around that in order to increase our influence with them?
Perry Holley:
Yeah. Ryan suggested. He called it, when you thinking about somebody that’s complicated, matter of fact, wherever you are now, think about someone complicated in your life that you think, oh, yeah, this is the first person that came to mind. He says, run a humanity check. And that’s a little tool he calls a humanity check. He said, think about this person and answer these questions. He said, what pressures might they be under that I don’t see? What do they care deeply about that may be driving their behavior? And how might I be contributing to the friction? And I just thought, you’re. Again, go back to what I said earlier, Bess.
Perry Holley:
How do you see people? Is that if I ask you right now? Do you have issues in your life right now or something you’re dealing with or something going on?
Perry Holley:
Yes, absolutely.
Perry Holley:
Everybody does.
Perry Holley:
Everybody.
Perry Holley:
Everybody’s got something. Everybody’s struggling with something. And I saw Adam Grant had a thing on one of his graphics. It had like a globe, a circle all colored in. In blue, and it had one green dot. And it said the blue was what’s going on in somebody else’s life. The little green pin prick said, what you know about it?
Perry Holley:
And I thought, that’s so good.
Perry Holley:
Yeah, you don’t know. So this really, to me, is just a great place to start about how do you see people? Can you. Can you have maybe empathy and understanding? Could you put yourself in their shoes for a minute? What are they dealing with? What are. What are they struggling with? What do they care so much about what’s going on?
Perry Holley:
And I just loved it directly in alignment with our intent versus perception gap, too. And you think about that, and as leaders and as people, we owe it to the other person to close that gap. And that’s what Ryan is talking about here. He also suggests another tool that he calls curiosity, Another favorite leadership word for us, curiosity mapping. He wants you to draw three circles. He wants you to draw the role, relationships and rewards. And then ask this question. What success looks like in their role? Who are they trying to satisfy in a relationship? And what they value or fear losing is in the rewards.
Perry Holley:
And what you’ll discover is that their difficult behavior is actually protective. It’s something that they’re protecting themselves from or something that’s inside one of those circles.
Perry Holley:
Yeah, like you said, curiosity. We’ve done podcasts on the miracle skill that it is. If you can be curious about people as much as you’re curious about customers, that you’re curious about the business, curious about how things work, curious about all these things, you ask more questions, you tend not to do so much telling, you do more asking, you tend not to judge you. You tend to be more open. Because I’m curious what’s going on. And judgment goes down. When it does, collaboration goes up. My ability to work with you takes a leap.
Perry Holley:
And I think Ryan got me thinking about this is get out of this fantasy world that we’re in, thinking that these people that we struggle with are going to one day wake up and all of a sudden be the people that they behave exactly the way we wish they’d behave. That fantasy, Ryan says, is what keeps us in. Stuck in frustration with them, just realize that they’re the way they are. Probably for reasons that you may or may not understand and that you can’t change, but you’re not going to change anybody. You can’t change somebody. They’ve got to change themselves. But finding a way through curiosity to figure out where they are and that humanity check how human are. They’re human and I’m curious about them.
Perry Holley:
I think I can start to set a solid ground.
Perry Holley:
One of the things that every single organization that we have the privilege of working with and partnering with, it’s over 200 a year is communication is at the top of what their pain points are. Well, guess what? Communication is actually where most leadership friction surfaces with anybody. Right. But in this particular case, Ryan goes on to say the complicated people in essence that you think are. They need more clarity than, than less. So what are you doing to make sure that there’s no ambiguity between, you know, what you’re communicating, what your expectations are of them in that in that role or what their rewards are like? It is your job to close that gap as we talk about and communicate in a way where you reduce all of that.
Perry Holley:
I mean he had a couple I’d like to get practical around what would I do with someone like this. And it’s just playing off what you just said was clarity. But clarify outcomes, not just activities. We tend to tell people here’s what I want you to do, here’s what I’m expecting to do now. Here’s, here’s the outcome that we’re looking for. I’ve heard Bernay Brown paint done for me on that.
Perry Holley:
Yeah.
Perry Holley:
What is it we want to have done and you know, using this ideas of success, you know, the, the scope, the, the quality of the timing, the.
Perry Holley:
Stakeholders paint done as much as you.
Perry Holley:
Can and then let them go with that. Don’t. I think where we get in trouble is we try to almost like micromanage or much detail about every activity. Let them give them the frame of the puzzle and let them fill in the puzzle.
Perry Holley:
Another one is name the decision rights, who decides who informs who executes a simple DAI framework, decider, advisor, informer. And that will keep a lot of surprises extremely low. A lot of frustration will also decrease not only in those individuals but in your role as well.
Perry Holley:
He calls out another one called the mirror and match communication preferences. He said ask them do you prefer bullets by email, quick slack, brief call, text message when in doubt. He said provide a short summary in writing after meetings. But just communicating in a way that, that the complicated person in your life can relate to and can and Will respond to don’t. Don’t go with style, which might be an email dump. And they’re going to. It makes. It escalates things.
Perry Holley:
Go.
Perry Holley:
Go with your style.
Perry Holley:
What. What if you didn’t list any of mine on there? Like, I’m not even sure I want to be. I’m just kidding.
Perry Holley:
Like, we know what your communication style is. We send, we send text messages into the ether and then they somehow come back. We’re not sure.
Perry Holley:
The same month or whatever it might be. That’s awesome.
Perry Holley:
Yeah. Your first line is, is there still an issue?
Perry Holley:
Yeah, that’s right.
Perry Holley:
Have you.
Perry Holley:
I hope you. I hope you move past this already.
Perry Holley:
Yeah.
Perry Holley:
Listen to understand before responding. This is an age old, you know, principle right here. He talks about 90 second rule. When tension rises, let the other person talk uninterrupted for about 90 seconds. Take notes, reflect back, and then start with, hey, here’s what I heard. Is this what you meant to say or communicate?
Perry Holley:
He also suggests scheduling, kind of building feedback loops by scheduling more sync points during the don’t wait until the quarterly wrap up where people blow up. Maybe even asking what’s one thing that would make working with me easier? That, that one kind of struck me going, oh, a minute. I think you’re the complicated one. But I have to ask how working with I can make it easier to go first.
Perry Holley:
I know you just go first, but.
Perry Holley:
I thought it makes so much sense. That’s why I said the book is about me. It’s not about all you complicated people. It’s about me.
Perry Holley:
That’s right, it’s about you. He also suggests for executives what he entitles the 3W close. I really like this. This is pretty simple, but I think it could go a long way at the end of any meeting with a complicated stakeholder, I would say maybe even any stakeholder, any meeting. Who does what by when, who does what by when. Capture it, circulate it. And the only way that you can have accountability around that is that there’s clarity between you and the people that were in that meeting.
Perry Holley:
Yeah. And this brings up those. And most of the about complicated people is about handling conflict. And many leaders try to downplay conflict, try to sometimes avoid conflict, you know, minimize it where we can. But that just builds up resentment with people, especially if there’s a bit of a rub or friction between you Anyway. So, you know, healthy disagreement can really boost performance. We talk about in the inclusive leader work, we do the big inclusive leader webinar and somebody said that they tell their team One of their unwritten rules that they made written was you have an obligation to dissent. I’ve never heard those words put together.
Perry Holley:
But are we, are we talking about SpaceX here?
Perry Holley:
Like what are we talking about? Yes, they’re saying when we’re having, we’re discussing things instead of there are going to be conflict and disagreement. We just, we, as we, we invite it. You have an obligation to dissent.
Perry Holley:
Got it.
Perry Holley:
And so you’re not allowed to just sit back and be angry and not share and then go away and talk bad about us behind our back in our meetings. You have an obligation to dissent. We expect it. And I thought wouldn’t that was that cool? Instead of avoiding conflict or minimizing conflict or trying to say there’s no conflict, there is. And complicated people, there’s going to be more. So bring it. Yeah. And let’s, let’s get it on the table.
Perry Holley:
And it minimizes frustration, lets people feel like they have a voice speaking of.
Perry Holley:
Disagreement and tension and frustration. Ryan has a. Again, this is an incredible book, incredible resource, a lot of research, a lot of data. It talks about a disagreement playbook and here is kind of the four parts of that state, a shared goal in this disagreement. You know, we both want a successful rollout that the customer loves. Number two, name your concern. Behaviorally I’m concerned. This is interesting right here.
Perry Holley:
I’m concerned that we’re skipping customer testing before launch. Like what is the, you know, what is the behavioral concern there? Number three, invite perspective. What are you seeing on the other side of my leadership? On the other side of this issue? What are you seeing? And then four is to co create experiment. Another interesting use of words here. What if we do a 48 hour beta with 10 clients and I think conflict that ends an experiment actually will be conflict that ends in an avoidance. So you’re not necessarily kind of jumping on ship with what the disagreement there is and completely changing. It’s like we’re kind of coming together, let’s try to beta, let’s see what ends up happening here. And you’re attacking the issue.
Perry Holley:
So the disagreement playbook is you, you, you share the goal, you name your concern, you invite their perspective and then you co create a experiment. I like that around that. So a little mirror moment. I guarantee that you are someone’s complicated.
Perry Holley:
Person speaking to me or I’m looking.
Perry Holley:
Across the table, aren’t I big boy? Yeah, I got emails to prove it too. So. Yeah, well I think we all need to think about that. That you’re somebody’s Complicated.
Perry Holley:
No doubt about it. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely we’re able to do that. So why does this matter? Like the law of the mirror is obviously, you know, if it’s a law, it’s probably tied to one of John’s books, John’s 15 invaluable laws of Growth. And that’s where we’re reminded that you must see value in yourself first to add value to others, but you must also see your impact in that situation accurately. And that’s where a lot of self awareness comes in in both those situations. So one thing you should be doing is kind of a self audit. Am I the complicated one? And I think we all have parts of us that are complicated.
Perry Holley:
And here are a couple of things that just quickly, you can rate yourself on 1 through 5. And again, these will be in the learner’s guide. You can download those and be able to go through this. And it’s in the book. And so lots of great content here. Here they are. I interrupt or over talk in meetings. I assume my urgency equals everyone else’s urgency.
Perry Holley:
I resist input that threatens what I have planned to do. I communicate last minute and then expect it to be instantly turned around. People seem cautious about bringing me bad news. Then total that up and see what that friction number is.
Perry Holley:
Yeah. And I think it’s a great insight.
Perry Holley:
I love that.
Perry Holley:
Am I the. Am I the one that’s happening that. Let me just. Before we let you wrap up around boundaries that complicated people can consume disproportionate amounts of your time and emotional bandwidth and boundaries can protect the mission and the relationship. So I just think for boundaries, to me, I think about, you know, my house. I have a. I have a small yard, but I have a fence around it. And the fence tells me what’s mine and what’s outside is someone else’s.
Perry Holley:
So I like that. That visual. To think just because someone’s complicated, I don’t need to take on all their stuff. And so some phrasing that Ryan suggests is some. Some language boundary language starters. I want to be helpful and stay on schedule. Can we review this during Tuesday’s sync meeting? So don’t just. They’re not just coming in and crashing on you and disrupting your day and disrupting you in the moment, but you receive it and I want to hear it.
Perry Holley:
But we’re going to schedule it. Another one was. I’m unable to respond in real time, but I’ll get to you with a written update by 4pm Again, receiving. Maybe the conflict, whatever’s going on but then giving them a response, letting them know you hear them. Another one said that request falls outside the agreed scope. Let’s align on priorities before we proceed. A boundary. Bring it in.
Perry Holley:
This is what we’re doing. This is what we’re not doing. But they’re. They’re really these guard rails that, that keep collaboration productive and just knowing that people are going to challenge us at certain times and there’s going to be friction. They’re different from us. That’s okay.
Perry Holley:
But.
Perry Holley:
But to put these guardrails around that boundaries, it helps frame it up.
Perry Holley:
Well, I’m going to wrap up really quickly by saying this. Go get the book. There’s so much good content in here. But I was thinking as we were talking through this, even if you removed the word complicated, isn’t this how. I mean, we’re in the people business and we need to see all people as individuals, as a person, not as a problem. And oftentimes, whether we’re driving down the road and see people as problems, which often happens at times, or we’re in our office or maybe it’s even in your own family, I think we got to step back and we have to be. We have to take the high road. High road leadership.
Perry Holley:
We got to take that first step. And I think he puts a lot of great tools in here for complicated people. I think it’s for people in general. So I just want to encourage you, make sure we’re looking at our team or those that we have influence with our family. We’re looking at them as a person, not as a problem.
Perry Holley:
Yeah. You know, you and I were meeting. We heard Dan Cathy, the chairman of Chick Fil a talk, and I was taken by a phrase Dan used. Somebody asked him a question about a relationship in his life that could have been heavily conflicted. It could have been complicated. And Dan paused and he said, that person that they were talking about has extraordinary grace with me. Extraordinary grace with me. He said, I don’t deserve it, but they treat me really, really well.
Perry Holley:
Yeah. Emotional about it. Like this individual lives that out on a daily basis.
Perry Holley:
That it I thought, I wonder who I’m giving extraordinary grace to. That was really hit me hard. I may need to be a little more graceful. I think we all could, to others, be kind. Well, thanks, Chris. And reminder, if you’d like that learner guide, like to learn more about the offerings that we have or more about our podcast family, you can do all that at MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast. You can also leave us a comment or a question there. We love hearing from you, and we’re very grateful you’d spend this time with us today.
Perry Holley:
That’s all from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.
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