How to stop being a difficult person to work with

Dear Bob …

I’m a programmer with a difficult personality. From what I understand, this is not uncommon, and I’ve been willing to live with the professional consequences of that. I’m lucky enough to have good technical skills and have had a successful 15 year careerer.

However, when I talk to people, I make them feel really bad. I don’t see this happening, I can’t think back and identify things I’ve said or done to cause these feelings, I don’t see it at all. Nevertheless, I’ve heard this plenty over the years from people I respect: People like my work, but they don’t like working with me. I’m not comfortable ignoring this; I need to change.

Over the years you’ve answered plenty of questions about how to deal with the difficult guy in the office. I’ve even used some of your advice. Now I see I am the difficult guy.

I suppose the first step is recognizing a problem exists, but what then? Classes? Prozac? Therapy? Any idea what can I type into Google to help me be, er, nice?

How can you develop empathy? Thanks,

– Difficult

Dear Difficult …

I have to give you credit. Twice. It’s rare that someone in your situation ever recognizes the need to make personal changes, so score one for you.

And … I’ve been doing this on and off for more than a decade, and nobody has ever asked me anything like this before.

Without more to go on it’s going to be tough to give you any specifics, and I’ll be the first to tell you that approaching your colleagues to ask, “Can you help me understand what I do that’s ticking everyone off?” is an unlikely way to begin.

Here are a few possibilities to consider that are relatively common in tech-land:

• “I’m always right.” Many smart, talented engineers grew up being the only smart person on the room. Not really, but it might have seemed that way, because they divide subject matter into what they care about and what they don’t, and they are the best at what they care about.This is the year “passion” will officially stop being useful and start being a cliché, and it’s too bad, because good engineers are passionate about engineering issues. The downside: An engineer who is passionate about a design issue and is accustomed to being the only smart person in the room fails to give anyone else credit for brains. Worse, instead of trying to persuade everyone else, they figure anyone who disagrees with them just doesn’t understand what they said. So they become increasingly patronizing.

  If this sounds at all like you, in every design discussion from now until you retire, don’t even offer your perspective until you are certain you understand what others are proposing, and … and this is very important … how they arrived at their ideas.

  Then, when you’re ready to present your own idea, don’t even hint that it’s superior. Instead, say something like, “I have a different perspective on this. I’ll be interested to hear what you think of it.”

• “I’m only interested in what I’m interested in.” Every field has talented specialists. Some talented specialists are so specialized they have no interest in any other subject. That quickly turns into social disaster, because it ends up meaning they aren’t interested in most of the conversations that go on around them.

  I’ve found over the years that most subjects are interesting, if you figure out how to dig beneath the surface. For example, I recently had a very interesting conversation with a food services sales rep about his line of commercial French fries. It turns out there’s some complexity to the subject, and some ingenious engineering to create different fries for different restaurant circumstances.

  The trick is to figure out a good question to get the other person started on an interesting track, then to continue asking perceptive questions to make it clear you’re paying attention. To get you started, imagine some of your colleagues start talking about knitting. I’m guessing it isn’t a subject that holds a lot of direct interest to you. And yet, as an engineer, you might ask, “You know, I’ve always wondered how this works. You never cross the ends of the yarn, just loop it over the knitting needles, and yet it still holds together. What makes it work?”

  As an engineer, you just might find the answer to be more interesting and involved than you’d think. As for everyone else … most people consider those who are interested in them and their subjects to be friendlier than those who are only interested in themselves and their own subjects.

• Failure to use the right pronoun. This is simple. When you’re trying to persuade anyone of anything, remember:

  Use “I” sparingly, and only to illustrate mistakes.

  “They” are the source of all evil and stupidity, so if you’re trying to contrast a superior approach to one that won’t work, use a third party for the latter – preferably, one nobody anyone in your group cares for in the first place. Management, Microsoft, and any cellular carrier are popular for taking on the “they” role.

  “You” are enlightened, understand the subject, and would never make the mistakes “they” make. Reserve “you” for the complimentary side of a contrast.

  “We” take on difficult challenges. “We’re in a tough economy. Some companies are engaged in indiscriminate layoffs – they’re going to make this year’s books look better, but at the expense of driving customers away. You know better than that, of course – I know you’re approaching this more carefully, to make sure we cut what’s least important to the people who buy our products and services. It’s going to be a tough challenge, but I’m confident we’re up to it.”

This just scratches the surface, of course. Two other suggestions. First, consider the possibility this is clinical. There are some well-known syndromes that are, to vastly oversimplify, variations on being all left-brain, no right-brain. You might just be someone who can’t easily interpret facial expressions or body language, for example.

There are programs to help people compensate by learning “left-brain” techniques for figuring these things out. But first, you need to know you need the training.

Which brings me to my last suggestion: Many HR organizations are set up to provide this sort of assistance to employees who ask for it. If yours is one of them, it might be worth your time to start there.

Good luck.

– Bob