What is important about this book
Amy Gallo addresses a central issue in today’s professional world: the difficulties of interacting and collaborating with colleagues, superiors, or subordinates, particularly when they may be considered “difficult”. One of the most interesting features of Getting Along is its pragmatic and nonjudgmental approach to difficult people. While many readings on the subject focus on the faults of others or the inherent difficulty of problem behaviors, for Gallo there are no “difficult” people, there are difficult behaviors. Every person has motivations and experiences that explain how they behave, and the key to effective management lies in understanding these dynamics and finding solutions that not only resolve conflict, but build bridges between people.
Amy Gallo, is a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and her articles have been collected in dozens of books on emotional intelligence, giving and receiving feedback, time management, and leadership.
The author believes that the advice out there is not practical enough: it is too lofty, too abstract, too general, so her goal with this book is to empower us to act now by providing a more nuanced, practical, evidence-based approach that recognizes the complexity of unhealthy relationships at work and the immense distress they can create. She wants to help people who feel trapped, who are not sure what to do and who may have tried the usual advice and found that it was not working.
Quotes
- “Negative relationships are bad for our colleagues and organizations and have stronger effects than positive ones”.
- “70 percent of the variance between the lowest-performing teams and the highest-performing teams correlates to the quality of team relationships”.
- “The fight-or-flight reaction dominates our executive functions, and it feels as if we’re no longer making choices about how to behave, that our bodies and minds are on autopilot”.
- “The real challenge in relationships is not changing the other person, but adapting one’s own reactions.”
- “Understanding the motivations behind difficult behaviors is the first step in improving communication.”
- “We cannot control the behavior of others, but we can always decide how to respond.”
- “Conflicts are not failures, but opportunities for growth.”
- “Empathy is the bridge that connects conflict to solution.”
- “Listening does not mean agreeing, but it is essential to productive conversation”.
- “Experiment to find what works”.
- “Sometimes trying something new, even something small, can shift the dynamic between you and a coworker who gets under your skin”.
- “Insecure managers are bad for business, because their egos are fragile, they tend not to listen to other’s ideas and resist feedback”.
- “Even mild instances of stress can cause a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities: we don’t think very clearly, and we lose our ability to make sound judgments, which is not a recipe for productive action”.
- “Much of the advice about navigating friction is based on several faulty assumptions”.
- “Your perspective is just one perspective”.
- “Be aware of your biases”.
- “Don’t make it ‘me against them’”.
Structure and contents of the book
In the first chapter, Amy Gallo talks about the research on the importance of relationships at work and why it’s worth our time and effort to try to make them better. In the second, she talks about what’s going on in our brain when we’re embroiled in conflict, i.e. the fight-or-flight instinct and how to find a productive way forward with a clearer head. This process includes adopting the right mindset, raising our self-awareness, and managing our reactions so we don’t escalate the situation instead of defusing it.
In the following chapters, this book identifies eight common archetypes of difficult coworkers and provides advice tailored to dealing with each one:
- The insecure boss
- The pessimist
- The victim
- The passive-aggressive peer
- The know-it-all
- The tormentor (who you’d hoped would be a mentor)
- The biased coworker
- The political operator
The strategies presented in the eight archetype chapters, along with nine principles outlined in chapter 11, are designed to help us work with just about anyone. Archetypes can help us assess the situation, but the real work comes when we move beyond them to a productive frame of mind, allowing room for the possibility that the person can change their ways and perhaps that we’ve even misinterpreted their behavior or misassigned meaning to their actions. Some people defy categorization, so the author also offers principles that will work no matter what type of bad behavior we’re dealing with. And, because dealing with a colleague we find difficult can be exhausting, demoralizing, and stressful, the last chapter is dedicated to strategies that prioritize our well-being.
Instructions for reading this book
This book is a roadmap for better relationships at work. Since not everyone experiences the workplace in the same way, the author has tried to attend to issues of race, gender, and other identity categories. In this book, Amy Gallo will walk us through how to find our own ways of getting along, whether we’re just starting out in our career or we’ve already encountered our fair share of tricky coworkers. It’s tempting to think we can just ignore our difficult colleague or not let their behavior bother us, but that rarely works. The insights, tools, and techniques the author offers are based on interviews she’s done with academics, social psychologists, management experts, and neuroscientists over the past fourteen years.
Through these personal stories, we will meet many individuals who were able to transform their relationships, turning enemies into allies. Others developed coping mechanisms to make the situation more tolerable, and still others made the tough call to leave their jobs to preserve their mental health.
Throughout this book, the author challenges us by requiring us to be “the adult in the room” to seeing our own actions and behaviors through the lens of these archetypes and admitting that our coworkers are flawed, but probably aren’t evil, and that we aren’t infallible ourselves is essential to getting along.
Amy Gallo’s wish is that this book will help us build interpersonal resilience, the ability to bounce back more quickly from negative interactions and feel less stress when we are deep in them. After reading this book we should be able to put work conflict in its place, freeing up valuable time and mental capacity for the things that really matter to us.