Day 26

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

In our communications class we navigated an exercise in "Dealing with Difficult People." This was the first and only time that Sue Yarkosky and I will get to work together down here (except for our Haggen presentation) and we did very well.

Eight of our classmates volunteered to play the difficult people (John Ignacio, Chris Jongko, Ron Mitchell, Christian Tesoro, Dawn Davies, Andrea Dimond, Tony McAndrews, and Michelle Schlefstein). Each had a role to play: "The Negativist," "The Super Agreeable," "The Complainer," and "The Clam" and a situation in which to play it. The rest of us broke into teams of two and for each situation we went into a room where the difficult person awaited. We had a little bit of background on the situation and a goal. For example, with "The Clam" we were a product management team that had to get their agreement to roll out a new product, but as we tried to convince them they just sat there and looked at us without saying anything. The key here was to ask pointed and open ended questions that required more than a yes or no answer.

Sue and I were reasonably successful with three of the four situations, but had difficulty dealing with Dawn in her role as "The Complainer." Having "worked" at the fictional company for over 30 years she had a laundry list of complaints and excuses. She's also quite a talker, so we had enough trouble just getting a word in edgewise, let alone attempting to modify her behavior.

This was a great exercise in which we not only learned a lot, but also had a lot of fun. The difficult people all played their roles exceptionally well.