Recently had to attend a sensitivity training at work.  It was presented by Barbara Khozam http://barbarakhozam.wordpress.com/ who was sufficiently cynical and irreverent for my tastes.  Of course everybody groans, cause nobody likes to be judged, but going in with a positive attitude wasn’t that bad cause well it seems pretty obvious some people could be hit with the nice stick a couple of times.  So my sadistic side gave my masochistic side a reason get into it.  🙂

Looks like the method to get you to actually think about your coworkers feelings for a whole 10 seconds or so revolves around doing a self style analysis to ground you, and talking about how your one of four different social/work strategies interacts with the other three.  This is done by peppering you with questions, performing some math, and then plotting the results.  Looks like this part of the presentation is pretty standard.  Here is a link to a nearly identical worksheet.  http://www.llleus.org/Docs/Personal_Style_Survey.pdf

Of course I messed it up.  I refused to pigeon hole myself with three of the fifteen questions and ended up with an even score.   If you are curious I am exactly in between fast and slow, and I’m more people oriented than task oriented.  I’m fairly well balanced.  Very disappointing.  ;p

We reviewed how to use this information to communicate with your co-workers, and that’s when I discovered something really interesting.  The best strategy for dealing with people in the ‘fast’/’task’ quadrant aka:targeted is to make sure you have a solution handy to any problems you present.  This lead to realization this it the ‘shoot the messenger’ quadrant.  Who shoots the messenger?  People with impaired long term risk management (the job of the conscience) skills.  In other words potential psychopaths.  After careful consideration it makes perfect sense.  Regardless of how they portray themselves, psychopaths are NEVER people oriented.  That’s the realm of legitimate empathy.  Their aggression also puts them on the ‘fast’ side  of things.  So psychopaths are permanently relegated to the ‘targeted’ quadrant.

If you have a psychopathic co-worker or boss you can’t get away from, consider the using the targeted list from the link above to help cope with them.  To them, you’re just a number, but if you are a good ‘number’ you may come out undamaged.  Also consider using the task mindset to demonstrate that they simply just don’t care.  Capitalize on (don’t create) a situation where compassion is blatantly called for, and make sure there are plenty of witnesses to the inevitable disregard for their fellow humans pain.  Hit them with some bad news just when they are expected to be kind.  Remember get away as soon as you can.  One day your luck will run out, and you’ll no longer be convenient.   But your conscience already knew that, didn’t it.