Paul Riismandel

In working with community groups–especially volunteer-run radio–and having management jobs over the last twenty years it seems like much of my effort has gone into the art of dealing with people. I have to credit my brother with an observation I think he made in his late teens that took many more years to truly reveal its truth to me: adults are really just big children.

One of the personality archetypes that I think most of us dealt with as children is the bully. While as adults we may not often encounter the school-yard type bully, who uses fists, physical threats and intimidation as his primary tools of manipulation, there are still bullies all over the place, in all stations and walks of life. And sooner or later you’ll have to deal with one. The problem with the adult bully is that because she or he doesn’t necessarily use physical intimidation, many of us do not easily identify that person as a bully, making that bully much harder to deal with.

I could write hundreds more paragraphs about bullies, because I’ve dealt with, and managed to circumvent so many of them over the last two decades. But this blog post today by Seth Godin makes lighter work of it:

Bullies can’t be bullies when they are alone.

If you work with a bully, this is all you need to know. They need you.

A bully is someone who uses physical or psychological force to demean and demoralize someone else. A bully isn’t challenging your ideas, or working with you to find a better outcome. A bully is playing a game, one that he or she enjoys and needs. You’re welcome to play this game if it makes you happy, but for most people, it will make you miserable. So don’t. …

Also today, Dustin Wax at Lifehacker posts “7 Ways to Deal with Annoying People and Still Get Things Done.” Each of the tactics is a good one, and Dustin provides just enough description to give us an idea of why and how it works.

The thread that runs through all of the “7 Ways” is the same basic advice as Seth Godin’s: Don’t engage, take your ball and go home.

The problem with this advice isn’t its simplicity, but rather how hard it is for most of us to enact. I think most people know this intellectually and can see the value when they think about it isolation. The problem comes when you’re face to face with that bully or difficult person. The best bully or difficult person is also a brilliant fisherman and seducer. She knows how to entice you into an engagement that turns into a conflict that she is better at controlling than you.

Why is the difficult bully better than you at controlling this conflict? Because she’s counting on the fact that you’re going to act according to rules that she has no intention on following. She expects you to be polite, to give the benefit of the doubt and then to either be conflict averse or ready to rumble. When threatened she expects you either to cave or defend yourself vigorously. No matter how the cards are dealt, the difficult person is the dealer, and the house always wins.

So much of the problem of dealing with the difficult bully is that you often don’t realize you’re sucked in and dealing with her until you’re already there, knee deep in fight or the dance. While the tactic of disengagement still works at this moment, it’s much harder to pull out mid-conflict, than being able to sidestep it from the get go.

The simplicity of the concept and the difficulty of its execution fascinates me, and yet I’ve learned quite a lot over my years of dealing with people. I think I’ve actually gotten pretty good at not getting suckered into needless, useless conflicts. It’s a subject that one very good friend of mine has been bugging me to share more publicly for many years now. I figure this blog is as a good a place as any to test it out.