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Employment Tribes

Learning to understand your colleagues and improve your work relationships is a vital first step towards improving your working life. We’ve identified five key workplace roles to help you to understand how often boundaries are breached and broken all day every day, and to teach you how to deal with different types of colleagues as well as your own behaviour.

As you read through the characters, note down in your Learning Journal where you recognise yourself or someone you know from your workplace. Be aware – workers may well fit into one or more set of characteristics; indeed you may move from one set to another yourself.

The A-Lister

Always anxious about their health, the ‘A-Lister’ (where A stands for Ailment) is either off work with ‘another virus’ regularly, or can be seen seeking sympathy in the office by bringing symptoms into the workplace or constantly discussing them. Not necessarily hypochondriac, the A-Lister’s concerns may be quite real.

This behaviour is essentially Child-like and pushes others’ self-boundaries by demanding sympathy, attention and perhaps support with the workload or a difficult boss.

Think of the Drama Triangle – this character is in the Victim position, wanting to be Rescued, but of course also inviting Persecution. Reactions can range from ‘Poor you’ (Rescuer) to ‘Not again’ (Persecutor).

BRING IN THE BOUNDARIES:

Your A-Lister Plan

If this is you …

Ask yourself a few questions:

• Can you remember when you first started to feel constantly unwell – that sense of picking up every bug going around?

• Does this chime with starting your current job or a recent career move?

• Perhaps it coincides with a change in work location or management?

The tangible symptoms of illness (however mild) can actually be a sign that you feel vulnerable and uncomfortable, and the only way to get support is to be ill. This would be particularly true if you are in a workplace you find toxic (either as a Victim being Rescued or Persecuted).

Draw the Line: workplaces can become toxic. Don’t let them poison your thinking.

Perhaps changing jobs or work locations is not an option, so think what can be done to make working life more pleasant. Can you see where you need to put better boundaries in place? Ask yourself the following questions and note down the answers in your Learning Journal:

• When you are at work, do you take on more than your colleagues? Do you work through your lunch hours? Do you balance work with good self-care?

• Are you in a job you think you should be doing, not the one you wanted to do?

• Could you build up your skill set to help facilitate a change when the time is right? Might those skills relate to something you always wanted to do?

• What was your dream job growing up? If your answer is ‘I wanted to be a ballerina’ – that might seem impossible now, but it’s not too late to bring dance and creativity in some way back into your life. For frustrated landscape gardeners, are you missing the opportunity to do something practical, get your hands dirty and connect with nature?

If this is your colleague …

Examine the boundaries of your relationship with them. Think about what you are experiencing.

Do you feel drawn continually to help? Do you stand up for them when other people are complaining, or do you give them the cold shoulder, irritated by their constant whining?

If you’ve identified that you are a Rescuer (meaning you feel drawn to help them), you will need to redraw the boundary and evaluate your own self-care.

Have you been staying longer to help the other catch up – so they don’t get in trouble with the boss? Have you been stuck by the kettle for hours as they offload their symptoms? Notice this will all be having an impact on your own work and life.

Draw the Line: when we Rescue there is always a cost to ourselves (this may emerge in the short or long term).

Start with your self-boundary. Only offer help at a level that will not deplete your own resources or affect your own wellbeing. Perhaps it is time to talk to your colleague, to express your feelings and explain your own position and limitations. You may be experiencing this colleague as leaning too far in and beginning to be uncomfortable. Areas that need to be addressed are your need for some space, your own workload which may be building up, your understanding of their distress and your own limits of what you can do about that. It is important to bring yourself back into the picture; this relationship is not one-sided.

So you might say: ‘I know you are having a tough time but I am getting anxious about my own workload. I need some headspace to focus on that.’

Perhaps you are finding the current situation so frustrating, you have turned your flexible self-boundary into a solid brick wall. But it’s not healthy to be walled in as your bottled-up resentment will become toxic to you.

To establish a better boundary, work to engage more consciously and with empathy both for the colleague and for yourself. Can you think back to a time when work was not smooth sailing for you?

An alternative scenario might be an A-Lister turning to a colleague who moves across the Drama Triangle from Rescuer to Persecutor. They don’t offer hot lemon drinks and comforting words, but are quick to tell the Victim to ‘buck up’.

Persecutors need to be aware of how much time they may spend in that relationship with an A-Lister. Even though they may not be voicing their frustration, a lot can be going on in their head, which could then come out at home after work when they offload to their partner. They will be more engaged with their A-Lister colleague than they believe (and possibly contributing to the unhappiness). Being empathetic, but taking a step back, will assist you in moving out of a Persecutor or Rescuer role.

So, what sort of thing could you say to an A-Lister who is driving you mad?

You could ask them: ‘What is it you need from me?’ This is inviting an open dialogue, rather than allowing yourself to have demands put upon you and instinctively wanting to push back.

The A-Lister may not be able to respond immediately because you are asking them to think, not just feel. If this is the case, ask them to think about the question and what they would like from you, and give them some space to do that. When they come back you can then talk about what you are able to do.

CASE HISTORY

Property solicitor Carmen had been seeing Jennie about her divorce, but one morning spent the whole session complaining bitterly about a ‘moaning’ colleague, Alex, who was always too ill to do her fair share of the larger, more complex cases their business depended on. Carmen reflected how she had been initially sympathetic towards her colleague, but had become frustrated with the constant absences and lacklustre approach to detail.

Carmen remembered the Drama Triangle and realised that when she was in her marriage, she had fallen into the position of Victim feeling persecuted by her ex-husband. To her surprise, Carmen realised she was now beginning to have Persecutor thoughts about Alex and wanted to address this.

She was able to realise she had initially Rescued Alex – taking on the more difficult, time-consuming cases while dispensing advice and sympathy – but that had then progressed to her feeling angry, resentful and finally moving to full Persecutor mode.

Carmen told Jennie she regretted moving from Rescuer (which felt nicer) to Persecutor (which reminded her of her ex-husband), but Jennie explained that neither position was superior as both reinforce the other person’s Victim status.

Carmen chose to deal with her situation by asking Alex what she really needed help with. Her fellow solicitor went away to think about it and came back asking if she could officially reduce her working hours and be given less complex work as she found it too taxing.

This opened up a dialogue about what could be done at work more generally, including Alex finding others in the organisation to give her support. Carmen could then decide for herself how involved she wanted to be.