Changing How Others Perceive You. Most Importantly, Those Who Dislike You.
If you've found yourself on someone's bad side, what strategies can you use to turn things around?
"I feel like there's just this wall in front of my career." Tanya said. “No matter what I do, I just can’t get ahead here.”
Tanya was a line manager of a software development team, and she had come to me for mentorship.
"My manager doesn't like me." Tanya said. "She hasn't liked me since she moved over to this organization, and no matter how well I think my team is doing, she doesn't seem happy."
"What is she not happy about?" I asked.
"I don't know." Tanya said with a huff. "She said she wanted me to step up, but I feel like I'm already stepping up. It makes no sense."
"Did you ask her to explain what stepping up is, and how that's different from what you're doing?" I asked.
Tanya shook her head. "I wouldn't want to talk about it like that. It would be awkward."
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
Relationships are a critical aspect of everything at work. Your ability to grow your career. Your enjoyment of your time in the office. Almost any danger to your job stability starts with a problematic relationship.
I'm going to walk through one of the more common relationship situations people face: "They don't like / respect me." Particularly if it’s your manager or someone important at your company, it’s of vital interest that you turn this around.
Your relationship with your manager is most critical to shore up, so I'm going to be addressing that the most. However, most of the points I outline apply to all relationships.
I'm going to walk through how you should think about these conflicts, what won't work, and then several strategies which I've seen work in the past.
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How to think about relationship discord
Relationships can be damaged in an infinite number of ways. But there are a few common patterns.
People don't get into conflicts with people who don't impact them. What I mean, is that you’re usually upset with someone not based on their behaviors, but based on how those behaviors make you feel. How they impact you.
Your co-worker doesn't dislike you for your low-quality work product. Instead, one of the following is likely to be true:
They dislike that someone has to fix it for you. It gives them or their team more work.
They dislike that you're not facing the consequences of your poor work. It means that their higher quality work is not being rewarded sufficiently more than your poor work. It feels “unfair”.
They feel negatively towards low-quality work as a moral issue, like how I feel when someone folds the pages of a book. It simply shouldn't be done.
Fixing a relationship typically begins with understanding the issues impacting the relationship. How do you begin obtaining this understanding?
Listen. I say this as a dramatic single word sentence for a reason. It's absolutely shocking how often I've been asked to help with a relationship issue, and I realize that the actors haven't listened to each other. They're taking their interpretation at face value, without listening to the other person.
I’ve repeatedly heard, "My manager doesn't like me. I don't know why." Yet in reality, it’s rarely "X doesn't like me". Instead, it’s "X has issues with me, due to Y behavior".
The challenge with listening is that people rarely want to hear the other person’s complaint. Because it probably requires change. Change is hard. And this is foundational to the conflict.
"My manager doesn't like me. I don't know why."
"What do they say? What is a specific complaint they've made?"
"They complain that I'm not getting enough work done."
"Are you getting less work done than your co-workers?"
"Yes, but that's not fair. The work I take in the sprints is harder than theirs."
This may be obvious, but if you have a conflict, there's a good chance that you're a little blind to what the other person is saying. Conflicts usually persist because of repeat behaviors. And we tend to be a bit blind to how our actions can impact others.
If you can, the simple answer is to try to address those complaints. This is obvious, but I'm continually shocked at how often people don't try.
Here is some literal feedback I've given to more than one engineer. "Your co-workers have repeatedly voiced their frustration that you're not showing up to standup meetings."
And then they don't show up to the next standup meeting. I mean, you can't profess that you want to fix a relationship if you're not willing to take the simplest steps to remove the conflict.
Ok, enough on this point. Listen carefully. Address the issues if you can. Those are the bare bones. Before we outline some successful strategies, let's go over what doesn't work.
These strategies don't work
What's funny is that I've seen each of these unsuccessful strategies employed repeatedly. This isn't rare behavior, but patterns I've seen time and time again.
Telling the other person they're wrong.
On the surface, this feels like an obvious wrong move. But people frequently don't realize that their defensive phrasing can make things worse.
"Your coding is low quality." → "But my code is usually good!"
"You're annoying your co-workers." → "But I'm not doing anything wrong."
"You're behind on your goals." → "I’m rarely behind!"
You can address facts if they're wrong. If someone tells you that you missed your date, and you didn't, absolutely (calmly and politely) explain that you don't think that's accurate.
But if someone has a less than great relationship with you, they're likely prepared and expecting you to push back if they voice a concern. If you push back, their reaction is almost guaranteed to be defensive as well. You're feeding into their expectations, and reinforcing their opinion. “Not only is their code low quality, but they don’t even recognize it.”
They have an opinion for a reason. No one has ever had their opinion changed by being told, "You need to have another opinion." Opinions are created by behaviors and observations. You need to focus on changing the input to their opinions, not the opinion itself. One follows the other.
Countering with other people's opinions.
This is essentially the above, except wielding a 3rd party's opinion as a counterpoint.
"But Susan said that my code was good in my last 360 review."
"But Tony doesn't have an issue with my behavior."
"But Jorge congratulated me on my launch."
Think of an opinion you hold. Economy seats on an airplane are too small, for example. Would you be convinced otherwise if someone said, "But Frank says economy seats are great!" Yeah, I didn't think so.
If you tell me that someone else disagrees with my opinion, I assure you that what I hear is, "You're wrong Dave. I trust this other person’s opinion more, and it’s proof that you're wrong."
For the sake of my ego, I'm now incentivized to prove that my opinion is even more right than before. I might be tempted to find more people who will agree with me.
What I won't ever do is say, "Huh, Jorge congratulated you on your launch? I guess I was wrong that you're not getting enough done. My bad!"
There was an engineer who was missing dates on projects he was expected to deliver. His co-workers complained that his work product (when delivered) was poor. I began giving him feedback on his job performance.
Rather than listening to the data I was giving him (and hopefully doing something about it), he went and essentially gathered signatures. He got positive feedback from a few junior co-workers, and presented that glowing feedback as proof that I (and his co-workers) had the wrong impression of his performance. This is not the first time I've seen this done. And yeah, it didn't work for this engineer either.
Doing nothing different at all.
This is the most common failed behavior of them all. Relationships have momentum. If someone likes you, they tend to like you more as you work together. This makes sense, as clearly they like how you do your work.
If someone doesn't like you, they tend to continue not liking you, and things might even get worse. If you don't change, and they don't change, situations continue going in the direction they were going. This means if you’re going downhill with someone, it tends to get worse.
There's that saying that the definition of insanity is continuing with the same behavior but expecting different results. That’s what you’re doing if you have a bad relationship, and don’t purposefully change anything.
Until recently, I was doing career coaching. This was the most common failure pattern by far. I've repeatedly heard from people, "Another 6-months have gone by. My manager still doesn't like me."
Did they change anything? No. So why would they expect an improvement? Change comes from change. If you feel you have a problem relationship with someone, the first thing you need to do is make a change.
Ok. Those things don't work. Let's talk through some successful strategies.