Coaching Skills for Managing Difficult People – Needs
Do you ever find yourself working with people who you wouldn’t choose as your friends? Whether it’s family, colleagues, or clients who are pushing your angry buttons, there are approaches you can use to manage the mayhem they cause inside you and challenge behaviour that doesn’t respect you. When people are being difficult it’s almost always as a result of 1 or more of these four factors:
Power – I need to feel I have some power
Escape – I need to feel I can get away from this
Attention – I need to feel some attention is being paid to me
Revenge – I need to get my own back
Whichever it is, they have needs that are not being met. Using the mnemonic above can help you to pinpoint the need they have and then respond in a way which either diffuses that behaviour, responds directly to the need or redirects the energy of that need to something else. For example a vengeful opponent who appears to want to publicly humiliate you, may be redirected towards suggesting a worthwhile idea which is adopted by the team and which is attributed to him. A student who is behaving aggressively may require the opportunity to escape from the pressure of a learning situation and so allowing them 5 mins down time away from other people cools down the situation and precipitates a rational discussion later. Of course sometimes the reasons for behaviour are compound and it is a combination of the factors in PEAR that are at work. Even so, coming back to the question of the needs of an individual always supports you in resolving difficulties because: 1. It gives you an objective framework to assess the situation, which immediately lifts you out of emotional responses to the situation which can cloud your judgment 2. It respects both of you as it allows needs to be met on both sides 3. It increases the choices available to both parties which in turn de-escalates situations.
There are occasions when the complexities of needs are too great to second guess, and in this instance the GOLDEN QUESTION comes up trumps: 1. Allow the person space to calm down if they are angry or in some other way emotional 2. State: I want to help you. To do this, I need to know what you need here. 3. Ask the GOLDEN QUESTION: What do you need? 4. Await the response. Add if appropriate: you can either tell me what you need right now or you can take a (state timescale) mins to think about it. Beyond this, the response that is given to the GOLDEN QUESTION then requires one of these responses:
a.OK, that’s no problem
b. That’s possible, and I would need the following in return for this
c. We can do that when…….
d. We can do this aspect of what you need and not the other. How does that still help you?
e. We can’t do that, but we can do this?
f. If you couldn’t have that, what would be the next best thing
g. That’s not possible, let’s look at how you could come to terms with that being the case
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