What to do when people are huffing, puzzling and nothing comes of it – that is, about the nature of cooperation with “noodles”

Maroszek: There was such a problem in the coaching world once: there were “holy laws”, such as: do not judge, respect the behavior of others, do not show anger and so on. This led to a parent, for example, seeing the child doing something wrong, but not paying attention to him because he had to have a coaching approach.

Dębowski: It’s such an effort to be a Buddha. At work – we cannot judge. No, it is not true. You have to evaluate and evaluate sometimes. The only thing is to do it consciously. If a coach or counselor says: “you can’t judge anything”, he creates a shadow, i.e. taboos, corpses in the wardrobe, sweeps under the rug and in this way takes away the space to be human. Because of this, sometimes people treat coaching negatively, because coaches are wise, they want to be holy than the Pope. And idealistic models cannot be applied everywhere. Sometimes these are teachings supported by noble intentions, but of little life. So it’s important that we make them real.

Maroszek: They made real ones, i.e. they tried to reach these ideals, at the same time giving themselves room to make mistakes?

Dębowski: Yes, because mistakes just happen and judging is the nature of the human mind. The problem of education in terms of management, coaching and psychology is that adepts of these sciences sometimes create a pressure of being perfect and then people have an image of coaches, personal development trainers or trainers as ideal. Or they perceive their superiors or people who are higher than them in the social hierarchy. This often triggers stress.

Therefore, in many organizations, coaching did not catch on, because those who used the “sacred truths of coaching” reflected from reality. It is like going to a construction site or a soccer match and banning profanity under penalty of a fine or imprisonment. Of course, you can talk about how to improve the culture of communication so as not to create conflicts, but you cannot introduce such extreme and often unnecessary changes. That is why in CVP we say that the point is not to use coaching in the company, but to manage change adequately to the situation and the organization itself. We need to know whether it is at stage 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0, and be aware of the stage of evolution at which our interlocutor is. We talk about it later in the book.

To sum up: 4 principles that improve communication

You will learn a lot more from the book “The Wall”, but now I want to leave you with some important conclusions that answer the questions: How to improve communication and collaboration? What influences fewer conflicts in the team?

Rule 1

Remember that whenever you judge someone quickly, labeling them “dunce, dumb, retard, backward, angry, ungain”, you are making your emotions of frustration grow, and at the same time you are not focused on finding a solution. You yourself feel more and more tense. Communication between you is patched, human is patched, but you close yourself off from correcting the situation. Therefore you must:

1. or apply a different patch: we do not understand each other, do not see what I do,
2. or stop patching but focus on answering the question: What do I need to do else to get this person to understand me in order to hit them?

Rule 2

Make rules (if possible) for better collaboration. It would be best to call things a spade a spade, name them while we chatter, puzzled, and work out rules in the team that will protect us from it. You just have to sit down with people, discuss the problem and ask questions: What can we do to keep us from talking about anything or talking to everyone crazy?

Note: Often times people cannot talk about such things. Therefore, you either have to learn it, or hire an external person who will conduct such a 2-3h or 1-2 day workshop for you. When I conduct such processes, I can see how difficult it is for people to have this type of conversation. Thanks to the fact that I am from the outside, it is easier for me to stick a stick in an anthill and conduct dialogue in such a way that people develop new rules of the game, without killing myself along the way.

Rule 3

Set clear boundaries – definitely show, say and write down what you expect, what you allow and what is unacceptable – often only after a specific, clear, firm expose (as boss or employee) people start to take these rules seriously.

Rule 4

Try to understand the causes of people’s behavior more often than less. The more you develop your Emotional Intelligence, Business Empathy, and Strategic Psychology, the easier you’ll be able to understand why a person behaves this way. The better we understand something, the less patient we lose patience and the faster we can influence a person.