It is tough having to deal with someone who abuses you. Moreover, it is more difficult to deal with, and manage a person, like a boss or supervisor, that has authoritative power over you. Someone that is in a position like your boss can trick you into a destructive way of behaving where you undermine your wellbeing from fear of repercussions when you address the issue.

If the verbal and other forms of mental abuse begin to get really serious and even approach physical abuse, the issue can become a legal concern. I have heard that people are trying to pass legislation in an American state that disallows workplace abuse. However, unfortunately nearly all laws do not take into account verbal workplace conflict so you have got to learn how to handle bullies by yourself for your own happiness and wellbeing.

Most people who lack the communication skills to deal with a bad boss either:

• Endure the bullying. They endure the bullying boss and intimidation. These people may have little self-respect or lack assertion skills. They may think their job is put at risk if they address their boss about the problem.
• Bully the bully. These people face their boss by reciprocating their boss’ aggression. It is quite common for the problem to then intensify as the two individuals yell at one another in intensifying conflict.

First Common Reaction: Endure the Bullying

This reaction to a bullying boss is a passive response. You forgo your own person needs while your boss tramples over you. The absolute last thing you want to do when being abused by anyone is accept the abuse.

You must address the issue in the correct manner otherwise your confidence, happiness, and in this situation, your work will suffer. People who receive aggressive behavior that is not correctly handled have been known to develop serious health problems such as strokes, heart attacks, suicide, migraines, escalated stress levels, insomnia, and terrifying nightmares. One person who will remain anonymous often dreamed her boss pointing a gun at employees so they would complete their work.

The most common reason for accepting intimidation from others is the fear of repercussions if you stick up for yourself. In a work situation, and especially with someone who has authoritative power, you probably do not defend yourself in fear of losing your job. This fear I believe is real because when most people stick up for themselves, they do so in an aggressive manner causing negative results (which you’ll soon see more about below).

These passive people forgo their own needs and get dominated by others. They live in massive amounts of frustration as their anger is bottled inside of themselves. They do not have the effective communication skills to address the problem as they think they must accept what happens and live with the intimidation hoping the abusive person stops bullying. The end result is a win for the bully and a loss for the passive person.

Second Common Reaction: Bully the Bully

The second common reaction to facing a bully is aggression. People who respond aggressively are willing to defend themselves and usually have more confidence than those who respond passively. They often see that in order to get what they want, they must retaliate. It becomes fire against fire. A fight starts as the two individuals take to a verbal boxing ring mentally beating out each other’s minds.

People may become aggressive for several reasons:

• They were abused by their parents at an early age and placed under emotional trauma.
• They are mentally ill. I’m not jokingly referring to a mental illness, but someone who has a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia or a personality disorder.
• They think the only way to stop someone else’s abusive behavior is to reciprocate the abuse.
• The aggressive individual may try to prove his superiority, toughness, control, discipline, or results-focus to others through aggressive behavior.

While aggression in the workplace may create the necessary level of productivity, it is strongly related to a high turnover rate, said to be an average of 1.5 years, and other commitment problems. Employees fake sick days, become miserable, sabotage their own work, and lose passion for their work. It can create unproductive employees as they “hide” by staying under the radar, seeking to comply, while do nothing that stands out that could potentially bring them attention. The aggressive communication being exchanged between two people becomes a loss for both individuals.

A Third Rare Action: Assertive Communication with the Boss

The first common reaction was a passive response. The second common reaction was an aggressive response. There is a response between these two common reactions known as “assertiveness” which produces a win-win response. Assertiveness is the secret you need to face an abusive boss.

Depending on the situation, occasional aggressive behavior can be definitely welcomed. In order for the aggressive behavior to be successful it must be expressed appropriately and constructively. You could even say this constructive type of aggression is like assertive communication because the end-result is a win for each party.

Where passive communication fails to respect yourself and aggressive communication fails to respect the other person, assertive communication respects both individuals. There are several assertive communication techniques you can use to stop the bullying, stop your fear, build your self-confidence, and create a nice working relationship with your boss. This is the power of assertive skills. Below I’ll share some techniques with you that are useful for the specific situation of facing an aggressive boss.

Joshua Uebergang
http://www.articlesbase.com/leadership-articles/manage-an-aggressive-boss-with-these-effective-communication-skills-685689.html

What is the best way to handle conflict? Your mother told you not to hit anyone, and your dad said don’t you dare run. When you enter the workforce and you face a conflict situation, what choices do you have? In real life, we cannot beat up our opponents. If we do, we might find ourselves in custody. Some of us do decide to “get even,” which often isn’t the best choice either. If we “turn tail and run,” we kill our self-confidence.

I offer one more choice. Communicate. Conflict occurs “When two or more people occupy the same space at the same time, but there’s room for only one.” As a middle child, I can relate to that definition. No matter which particular space I wanted to occupy, one of my sisters claimed it. Whining, complaining, punching didn’t alter that reality. As an adult, I can see situations of conflict arising every day. The space might not be the window seat, but it might be the office with the window. The space might also be a philosophical view. When two people collide over ideologies, they hold a mental space that only they can occupy.

How can we resolve conflict through communication? I’ve created a method of communication, the Say It Just Right Model that can help us. This practical model will help you communicate your way out of conflict.

The Say It Just Right Model has three components:

The Three C’s

Change. Recognize that change happens within you. You cannot change other people. Once you recognize this very important fact, you will stop trying to impose your will on others. What you want to do is say what you want to say, listen to the other point of view with an open mind, and then move on. The other person must decide to change.

Curiosity. Enter the conflict situation with a genuine interest and curiosity. When you come into the conversation acting as if you have all the answers, how can you discover what the other person is thinking? Use your natural born curiosity to discover what prompted someone to do something or what prompts them to want something.

Compassion. By putting yourself in the other person’s place, you discover what it feels like to be that person. What is going on in their mind? What concerns, values, interests occupy their time?

The Decision Points

Before deciding to enter into a conflict discussion, you must consider three components.

What are the Costs? When you look at costs, you examine what you will gain by having the conversation and what you might lose by not having the conversation. You want to look at these issues realistically. Will you really lose your job if you confront your boss over a disagreement? Will your marriage end because you want your spouse to do more work around the house? How important is it to you to directly confront this behavior? If you do not confront the behavior, will it happen again?

What are the Limits? Where are you going to draw the line? Before you go into a conflict conversation, you want to make sure you are clear about what you will accept and what you will not accept. In other words, what concessions are you willing to make? Where is your line in the sand?

What are the Power Sources? Power comes in many shapes and sizes. Just because you are the subordinate does not mean you hold no power. Think about the power you do hold and the power the other person holds. How can you use your power to your advantage? How can you emphasize your assets?

Personality Overlay

How people respond to you depends a lot on their personality style. Here are some tips for dealing with four typical personality styles.

Aggressor: Be direct yourself. Know what you want to say and say it quickly. Do not respond defensively when they attack. Remember they attack everyone. In this instance you must have very clear limits.

Persuader: Allow them to talk. Ask open questions that get them talking about the problem or issue at hand. In this instance you will want to show a lot of curiosity. Be open and listen.

Fact-Finder: Give them facts and data that support your position. Be as direct as you would with the aggressor, but in a clear and orderly way. In this instance, you will want to make the Power Sources real clear. It helps if you can discover a mutual goal—something you both wish to accomplish.

Listener: Share openly what your concerns are. They will listen to you. Your job is to listen to them with compassion. Show them the same compassion they show you. Do not end the conflict with a mutual apology without a resolution.

Now that you have thought through the Decision Points and you have decided the type of personality you are dealing with, you are ready to conduct the Say It Just Right conversation with the Three C’s in mind.

Joan Curtis
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/no-punching-no-running8212communicate-how-to-resolve-conflict-746728.html

Communication is one of the fundamental necessities of our relationships with other people, whether it is a stranger, work colleague, family member, child or life partner. While our interpersonal relationships can be rewarding, many of us find ourselves in situations of mis-communication and communication breakdown, often leading to interpersonal conflict.

Do you find that people often misinterpret what you are saying or your intentions? Have you ever felt that you have totally missed the meaning of what someone else was communicating to you? Do you have difficulty expressing what you would like to say? Rest assured, many of us are confronted with situations like this in our relationships with others! We are left feeling like we are not being heard and our relationships suffer. In the end, our most developed societal tool is also one of the most productive conflict factories in the history of mankind.

In order to tackle two problems with a single solution, we’ve devised a comprehensive article on communication – and how improving it can not only improve your personal relationships, but also ensure that your professional life is on the right lane.

What is communication?

Body language, sign language, verbal language, writing, gestures, broadcasting – you name it, it is part of the process of communication. Communication is a broad concept and its history can be traced from a wide variety of pathways. Gesture and body language are the most primitive forms of communication, being practiced even before humans were able to produce ‘sound’ verbal language. Verbal language is possibly the most prominent human form of communication (albeit not the most used – it is perceived to be only 7% to 11% of communication). Some philosophers affirm that our capacity to verbally communicate with each other is the link which separates humans from other animals in the evolutionary scale.

Written language, another particularly prominent and advanced form of human communication, was initiated not so long ago – around 3,000 B.C. when the Egyptian civilisation created their first set of hieroglyphics. The complexity of human communication evolved analogously with the human capacity of learning, invoking major evolutionary changes in the brain structure and resulting in our capacity to improve (or arguably complicate) the way in which we communicate to each other. For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on verbal communication and body language.

Interpersonal Communication

Interpersonal communication can be defined as the transactional process of creating meaning through mutually responsive entities – or less formally, transmitting and receiving messages to and from other individuals. When people are communicating, they’re being bombarded with information which, in most cases, they vastly fail to perceive. Why? Because people are not aware of the manner in which others perceive the world and themselves. They may have a rough idea, and even share some commonalities, but being able to predict interpretation of meaning to its full extent is impossible. However, it is possible to recognise some general trends.

Interpersonal communication has a core structure: sender, receiver, message and context. When the first ‘message’ is produced, a receiver will interpret that message according to his personal background (values, culture, experiences, knowledge and more) and according to the context in which the message was produced (situation, relevance, sender characteristics and more). To effectively communicate, people need to be able to align each individual’s background information to the verbal or cultural significance of the message being transmitted. Relationships are based on that common level of understanding, and the more people fail to communicate to each other, the more they develop personal assumptions that could lead to conflict.

Barriers to communication

Considering its complexity, understanding the core challenges to interpersonal communication can vastly improve the process of interpreting people’s messages, and helping them understand how to interpret yours. According to Bolton (1993) there are twelve major communication spoilers, listed in three different categories:

Judging

1. Criticising – making a negative evaluation of the other person.

2. Name-calling – stereotyping the other person.

3. Diagnosing – analysing the other person’s behaviour.

4. Praising evaluatively – making excessive positive judgments to the other person.

Sending Solutions

5. Ordering – commanding the other person to do something you would like.

6. Threatening – controlling the other person’s actions by warning about consequences.

7. Moralising – telling what the other person should do in a given situation.

8. Inappropriate or excessive questioning – using close-ended questions in excess.

9. Advising – giving the other person a solution to a problem.

Avoiding the Other’s Concerns

10. Diverting – “pushing” a solution to the other person’s problems.

11. Logical argument – attempting to convince the other with an appeal to logic and facts.

12. Reassuring – trying to stop the other person from feeling negative emotions.

Improving Communication

There are many effective strategies to help improve interpersonal communication. Effective communication does not only involve the transmission of a message, but also ensuring that the other person is devoting enough attention and that the environment is appropriate to transmit the message (controlling the ‘noise’ and ‘interruption’ levels).

Attention is the major skill that needs to be ‘practised’ during the communication process. The more attention devoted to a dialogue, for example, the better a communicator can recognise body language and voice trends. Furthermore, understanding the context of each message and aligning that to the other person’s cultural and emotional background plays a key role in creating reliability in the interpretation.

Basic Communication Skills

Such rules are beneficial for any communication process, but particularly important during a formal relationship.

1. Listening well – valuing the client and demonstrating interest for the conversation.

2. Observing – observing body language, voice tone and emotive expressions.

3. Acknowledgement – the recognition for the client’s initiative to state his/her issues.

4. Awareness – ensuring that the counsellor’s body language is appropriate for the context.

5. Thinking – reasoning about what is and what is not appropriate input to the process.

6. Verbal expression – ensuring the use of the appropriate tone, rhythm and volume of voice.

7. Reflecting – clarifying and verifying what the client has expressed to the counsellor.

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Pedro Gondim
http://www.articlesbase.com/communication-articles/communication-mechanical-and-social-principles-139761.html

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