Dr Moira Jenkins is a CINERGY Conflict Coach, Clinical Psychologist, and has post graduate qualifications in Conflict Management and a PhD which focuses on the prevention and management of workplace bullying and harassment. This background coupled with practical experience has enabled her to develop tools and strategies for managing difficult people.
We all experience high-conflict behaviours and ‘difficult’ customers, employees and bosses at times. This behaviour can manifest itself through inappropriate emails, telephone interactions, and vexatious or unreasonable complaint behaviour, as well as face to face encounters. If not managed appropriately high conflict behaviours contribute to increased stress for workers, teams, and managers that are confronted by inappropriate and often manipulative behaviour on a regular basis.
High conflict behaviours often take a disproportionate amount of time to manage, and as such are often put in the too-hard-basket until an ‘explosion’ occurs.
We find that too often it is just assumed that staff should know how to deal with high conflict situations, and managers, team leaders and supervisors should know how to manage high conflict staff. Most don’t understand why some people behave in this highly defensive and ‘prickly’ way, or know how to manage their highly antagonistic behaviour.
We have run workshops and have undertaken coaching with managers and staff who deal with difficult people. These workshops can provide a framework for your staff and mangers to better understand and manage this high conflict style of behaviour. These are practical interactive sessions and we have received excellent feedback that they are really useful for managing difficult people.