Video: Promoted to Manger website

Video: Promoted to Manger

 

 

You Got Promoted And A Coworker Didn’t: Interpersonal Skills For Diffusing The Anger

Let's say you just got promoted to manager and one of your former co-workers, former colleagues, is pretty ticked off because you got the promotion and they didn't. How do you deal with this? It takes developing some interpersonal skills.

There are a couple of things you're going to do here to develop the right interpersonal skills. First is when you meet with this person, you don't want to get into a big, long conversation about how they got shafted and how you're the teacher's pet. You want to avoid that stuff. What you want to do is apply good interpersonal skills by saying 3 basic things: #1”Listen Pat, I'm really excited to be working with you, and I'm really excited to do great stuff together.” Use your interpersonal skills to say something that expresses how excited you are to be working with this person.

# 2: Again, using good interpersonal skills you next want to say, “Listen, there's still an elephant in the room here, but having a conversation about things we can't control isn't going to be good for either of us. Let's not talk about all the things we can't control. Let's instead talk about the things we can control.” This is a very important mentality to have when you're dealing with conversations that are going to get derailed: “I want to talk about what we can control.”  And if they ask, “What do we have control over?” You can say, “Well, I have some more visibility into new opportunities. I know you wanted to be the manager, but I can't control that in this case. What I can control though is helping you still achieve your goal of being a manager.” This is using good interpersonal skills.

# 3 Finally, we want to say, “Let's spend a few minutes talking about your goals. Where do you want to get to? What are the kinds of skills you'd like to develop? What are the sorts of opportunities you'd be looking for?”

So we do those 3 things, 1) I'm excited to be working with you, 2) We’ve got to talk about the things we can control and I don't want to talk about the things we can't control and 3) One of the things we can control is helping you if you still want to be manager. I have some insight here. We can work on your goals, we can put some things together, I can identify opportunities for you, let's control that together. If you do these 3 things, apply these interpersonal skills, it will help you steer the conversation away from the blame, recriminations, all that stuff: pouting, irritation and disappointment. You want to move past that and instead get this person focused on being positive, proactive and taking a step in the right direction.

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