In leadership, our relationships with others are often a key component to how satisfied we can feel about our work. When we feel friction or have negative emotion towards someone, it impacts our desire to collaborate, our willingness to proactively seek them out and share information, and often we can even be reluctant to assign work to them or interact at all.
We think that it’s because of them. That they should be different and if they were, it would solve all of our problems. Unconsciously, we do this with subordinates, peers, boss, even our kids and spouse. We unconsciously have rules in our head for how they should behave.
Let’s take a former boss of mine as an example. For a long time, I held the belief that if he was just different, I wouldn’t dislike my job so much. I had thoughts for how he should behave such as:
- He shouldn’t yell at people.
- He shouldn’t judge others so harshly.
- He should be more responsive.
- He shouldn’t be distracted when we are talking.
- He shouldn’t take so long to make decisions.
And because the rules I set for him didn’t match how he showed up, I was mad or frustrated a lot of the time. But he was never going to be anyone other than who he was…because he was REALLY good at being himself and terrible at being the ideal version of him I had in my head (which he wasn’t even aware of).
In coaching, we call these manuals. A manual is simply a set of rules you have for how another person should behave. Think of it like a manual you have for your car, stating how it should operate. This manual is typically unspoken. Until now, you probably didn’t even realize you had one on another person. You just knew that if that person behaved how you wanted them to, you would feel so much better. In fact, if they showed up like you wanted them to, you might even love your job.
Knowing that this is the reason for the friction and then making a conscious decision to drop our manual is the first step to releasing the negativity we feel towards them. It sounds simple, but does take some practice of realizing in the moment that “oh, I feel this intense negative emotion because I want this person to behave differently”. Instead, we get to drop the manual, choose to accept them as they are instead, and not base our personal happiness on how they behave.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t have job related expectations or even boundaries. The difference between an expectation or boundary and a manual is that our own personal happiness doesn’t have to depend on how they behave. We can set an expectation that if our peer uses profanity and raises their voice, we will leave the room. We can also set the expectation that if our boss doesn’t respond to an important email that’s holding up work, we are going to show up between their meetings and expect to walk with them in order to get a verbal response or if our subordinate doesn’t complete the deliverables on time for their project, we will have to put them on a Performance Improvement Plan. When we drop the manual, it’s no longer personal. The focus changes to the business issue at hand and we free ourselves from the tension of thinking they need to be any different in order for us to feel good.
Where in your life do you have manuals that are causing you pain?
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