What are “Needs” and why do they have everything to do with how things go at work?

Do you remember the last time someone pushed your buttons?

In that instant, did it seem like they crossed the line, almost intentionally?

What emotions got triggered, and how did you control your reaction?

That emotional reaction comes from having a need that isn’t being met, and this is important because almost every single ridiculous thing that happens between people at work, happens because someone has a need that isn’t being met. Most of us aren’t aware of our needs. We just experience spurts of annoyance and frustration with each other, but in a work environment, it’s an ongoing battle of unresolved animosity that undermines trust, communication, and productivity to the nth degree.

We may be able to hold ourselves back from reacting in the moment, but then we vent like crazy to our friends, we “forget” to provide information that the “button pusher” needs, we go out of our way to avoid him or her, and our judgments of each other get harsher. Eventually we decide we simply can’t work together at all.

All it takes is one struggle like this on a team to undermine productivity, but most teams have several “button pushing incidents” going on in tandem, and repeating themselves regularly.

If you make it your business to understand how needs work, you have the power to break through the barriers and maintain a productive work environment, both for yourself and your team.

Here are a few tips to get started:

1. Keep a log of all of your “emotional reactions” at work. Write down the situation and ask yourself “what did I need in this moment?” Listen to the first word or phrase that comes up, and write it down – even if it seems silly.

2. Once your log gets long enough, see if you can find a pattern. If the same words or phrases repeat themselves, you may have nailed an important need. You will also notice that the same people or situations will serve as a trigger for the need, over and over again.

3. At first, it will seem like the only solution is to make the person who is “pushing your buttons” change their behavior and treat you differently. Often the person is someone you have to work with a lot, like your boss, team-mate or subordinate. Unfortunately, you have to start this process by accepting that the person in question will probably not change. BUT the good news is that as you do the needs work, focused on YOURSELF, your reactions to the person move to neutral, and as a result you are able to provide more effective feedback, and the person does change. You just have to be willing to take the indirect route, work on yourself first, and trust that things will end up changing as a result.

4. The person who really has control of getting your needs met is YOU, even though it seems like other people are the source of what you need. What you’ll realize once you do some thinking, is that you have more power than you think, and you’ll also begin to see what you can do to influence the world around you and get more of what you need.

5. An interesting paradox about needs is that we often close ourselves off to receiving what we most need from others. It’s like having trouble accepting compliments. One of the biggest things you have to learn is to graciously receive what you need when it comes to you, even if you don’t really care that much for the source.

6. You also have to learn to give YOURSELF a lot of what you need – listen to that inner voice, and notice what you say to yourself over and over again. If you need to be accepted, are you accepting yourself? If you need to be heard, are you ignoring yourself? It seems like an odd thing to check for, but you may be surprised when you start paying attention.

7. Once you get a feel for how needs play out in your own life, start observing other people and their interactions at work. Pay attention in meetings and notice when someone has an edge to their voice, a hint of sarcasm or resentment. You’ll begin to pick up on the dynamics of others on your team, and may even find subtle ways to intervene and facilitate better interactions across the whole team.

At work, whenever things start getting weird, one of the most powerful things you can ask is this: “are you getting everything you need in this situation?” If you are genuine, this question can dissipate emotion from people who aren’t even aware they are reacting, and give them an opportunity to articulate what they do need. Sometimes it’s as simple as clarity on priorities, extra time to finish a project, or appreciation for work they did that is no longer going to be used.

As independent and self-sufficient professionals, we don’t want to “have needs”. But whether we want to admit it or not, we all have this stuff going on underneath, and if it’s not dealt with directly, it shows up anyway – resulting in poor communication, inefficient team-work, and wasted time, which no organization can afford these days.

No matter what type of organization you work in, you can take yourself to the next level by learning about your own needs. Start with the seven tips above, or you can join the Aspyrre Community, an ongoing professional development program, that provides insight to help you see what’s really behind challenging situations at work, and tools to manage the situations effectively and get better results. For more information on the Aspyrre Community, click here.

How to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss

Bosses are tough to deal with in general. They represent authority, and they often bring back memories of what we hated most in our relationships with our parents and teachers growing up. The micro-managing boss is especially hard to handle if you are creative, innovative, and want to make a contribution of your own in an organization. But since quite a few people in management positions fit this profile, chances are you will end up with one at some point in your career. Here are some tips to help you get the space you need to thrive:

1. Understand that micromanaging behavior is driven by the positive characteristics of conscientiousness, diligence, and responsibility; it’s just that they have been taken to an extreme. People often confuse themselves with the quality of the work they produce. As long as they can control the quality of their work, they are ok, but as soon as they have to depend on others for results, they are faced with the fear of representing sloppy or substandard output. Since putting out less than excellent work is SO personally humiliating, they need constant reassurance that the team is performing. Keep in mind that behavior such as constant checking on your progress or reviewing your work has NOTHING to do with how well you perform. It is about your boss, who has gotten so caught up in his or her fears and needs for reassurance that he or she is not aware of how this behavior may be impacting you.

2. You can give yourself space by playing to their standards for excellence and needs for reassurance. Initiate a conversation about expectations and standards of work output, and make sure your boss is clear about where your standards are. If you have a difference of opinion, get it talked out and come to an agreement about what standards you are both comfortable with. Then COMMUNICATE. It’s natural to react to micro-management by doing everything possible to avoid communication. But that just plays into the vicious circle of mutual mistrust and escalates the problem. If you develop a habit of sending a short e-mail on a daily or weekly basis that gives your status on a project and how you are handling situations, the boss gets a stream of continuous reassurance, and wont feel a strong need to check in.

3. Once you have developed a certain degree of trust with your boss, you may want to take it to the next step, and that is providing feedback on the impact of the micromanaging behavior. For example, “I notice that you have redone my last three powerpoint presentations. I understand your desire to have us represented in a positive light, but you may not realize that you are sending a subtle message, that I can’t do powerpoint presentations, and that makes me feel less excited about doing them well in the first place. Is there something specific you are noticing about the way I do my presentations that does not meet the standards we agreed on related to our work?”

Unfortunately, the micro-managing boss ends up fulfilling his own fears. As he takes more responsibility for the work of the team, the team feels completely disempowered and loses the motivation to produce their best work. Soon they are complaining and doing very little, and he is fretting about how they don’t care and he has the weight of more than one job on his shoulders. It may take several attempts to help him turn around, because he needs to let go and allow himself to look bad in order to re-empower the team, build trust, and get to the point where he gets results that are better than he ever dreamed.

If you are a micro-manager, or you work for one, anything you can do to facilitate the change will be a positive learning experience. Giving your boss feedback that enables him to become a better leader is a gift he will be forever grateful for. And if you are that boss, imagine getting rid of the experience of being overworked and not being able to trust anyone, and moving to a place where you get to work with people who consistently go well beyond the call of duty, and you are so honored to be their leader that you would never consider taking ownership for the phenomenal work they put forth.

Dealing with Frustrating People at Work

Do you ever wonder how much more work you’d get done without the people? And to prove it, do you sometimes go in on a weekend and notice that you got an entire week’s worth of work done in just two hours? Dealing with other people at work is one of the most time-consuming things you have to do. And dealing with frustrating people can downright stop productivity in its tracks.

One of the most common types of frustrating people are the ones who seem to be “blocking” your ability to move forward without any logical basis for their behavior. They might throw up additional hoops for you to jump through that seem completely insignificant. They might get distracted running in so many directions that the team can’t focus on one thing long enough to move forward. They may be polite and cooperative and seem to understand what needs to be done, but then never follow through. Or they may simply be “too busy” to help you and look completely offended and put out at the expectation that you would expect anything more out of them since they are already overworked.

We all have different work styles, and this tends to exacerbate the situation. Sometimes it can be really enlightening to learn about your work style and compare it to those on your team. Although there are many different “work style” assessments, almost all of them group people loosely into four categories:

The Visionaries: These are the leaders who see possibilities, get excited about them, and can get everyone else excited and moving in one direction, but they don’t like to bother with the details, and sometimes they get so many new ideas that they are off and running in a new direction before you have a chance to act on the first plan. If you are a visionary, process oriented people will bore you, and drive you nuts, because it will feel like they are slowing everything down to a snail’s pace while the window of opportunity closes. A good coping mechanism is to realize you need process oriented people to bring your ideas to life and build in the quality they need to stay alive.

The Systemizers: These are the process oriented people who care about the details and get things done thoroughly. They are behind high quality and reliability. Their diligence can make the difference between a brand you can trust and a “rinky dink” outfit. But they take a long time to think things through, and sometimes they are still working out the details of a project when everyone else has lost interest and moved on. If you are a systemizer, visionaries will seem like unstable lunatics, and it will be hard to see the method in their madness. One thing that can increase your appreciation for the visionaries is that they are usually the ones out there bringing customers in to appreciate what YOU have worked so hard to produce.

The Task Masters: Task masters are focused and they don’t mind pushing the team to get things done. Once their eyes are set on a goal, they drive everyone involved towards that goal and have no patience for dragging feet. Of all the work styles, task masters have the least patience for all the “people issues” that get in the way of progress. They aren’t interested in whether or not people feel fulfilled by the functions they perform, or whether people on the team actually like each other, or if things are “fair”. They just want to get to the goal as quickly as possible. If you are a task master, you may be puzzled because it seems like you are offending people left and right when all you want is to get the job done. One thing that may open your perspective to having a people pleaser on you team, is that when people are getting along emotionally, it’s amazing how much more productive they are.

The People Pleasers: People pleasers want everyone to get along, feel fulfilled, and enjoy working together. They care most about creating the kind of work environment that allows people to be their best and perform accordingly. What frustrates them the most is watching members of the team disengage because they aren’t feeling respected or valued, and they often build up a lot of resentment towards the culprits, labeling them as rude, political, or otherwise “unworthy” of respect because of their lack of consideration for their fellow human beings. If you are a people pleaser, one tool that helps is proactively looking for a positive intention behind the behaviors that offend, and taking the initiative to build stronger relationships with ALL personalities in the workplace. This enables you to use your natural strengths to help create the positive environment you cherish, and see people thrive as a result.

Understanding your work style and those of others you work closely with is a first step towards getting more done as a team. You can’t always get away from working with people, but the more you learn about how people work, the more work YOU can get done!

When ONE relationship drives you nuts! How to get over it.

Every once in awhile, you will run into someone who gets under your skin. Maybe you are too intrigued for comfort, or consistently angry about how they treat you. If you find yourself focusing on a particular person and emotionally reacting to him or her more than you would like, it’s time to look inside yourself, and see what unmet need the person is triggering.

We all have needs, and we are driven to get them met. Unfortunately, we tend to “push down” many of our needs, because they make us feel vulnerable. Sometimes we are embarrassed of having them, and often we don’t feel like we have control over getting them met. But conscious or not, we will continue to work to get our needs met, and when the subconscious parts of our brain take over, the result is usually less-effective behavior, the kind you exhibit when you are panicking or reacting to something.

In many cases, especially with relationship needs, we begin to focus on one person and decide that they are the only person who can meet our needs. Unfortunately, this practice creates scarcity, and almost guarantees that the need will remain unmet. Even if the "focused on" person tries, they can never give enough. This sets into motion a dynamic where the person with the need is often angry and resentful, and the other person feels drained by the relationship and pulls away. This happens a lot in love relationships, but also in friendships, and in the workplace. At work it’s especially common in boss / employee relationships where the employee is focusing on the boss.

It is important to understand that all needs reside within you, and it is your responsibility to get them met – even relationship needs. This is why we have the saying “you must love yourself before you can truly love another”. If you don’t love yourself, then your relationship with someone else is only about getting love from them, which comes across as manipulating them so that you feel loved by them, instead of truly loving them by allowing them to be themselves.

Relationship needs are satisfied in the energy that is created through connection with others. But you aren’t limited to or dependent on how others treat you. You have a relationship with yourself, and you may have a spiritual relationship with a higher being. If there were no other people on the planet, you would instinctively be driven to create special relationships with animals and plants. Potential for relationship is everywhere, and it’s bi-directional. You don’t just get it – you co-create it. That’s why giving so often feels like receiving, and people are often driven to give what they most need from others. It’s a strategy that sometimes works, and works even better if you are aware of your true motive for giving.

To “let go” of the person you are focusing on, you need to do two things:

1. Identify the need you are trying to get met from that particular person.
2. Get that need met outside the relationship, in as many other ways as possible.

Initially, it will seem like there’s no other place to get the need met, or that the other places don’t matter, but this what I call “panic mode”, where your brain stops the creative thinking process and has fallen into the adrenaline driven action process. To create abundance from scarcity, you get your brain working on how to get the need met outside of the relationship you are focusing on, and the way to do that is ask yourself questions. Here are some you can start with:

1. What is the specific feeling I get when this need is met?
2. What are all the situations where I get a similar feeling?
3. How can I co-create something similar (although perhaps not as good) in my other relationships?
4. What can I do in my relationship with myself to get this need met?

Even though some people aren’t as interesting as other people, there are usually enough of the base components available in everyone you meet, so that you can co-create a little bit of what you need in various different people, which is usually the healthiest and most empowering way to get your core relationship needs met.

At a deeper level, you may have to listen hard to the negative voices in your head. Usually, the biggest culprit in unmet relationship needs is that “voice” that hangs out in your head and talks to you all day. If it’s critical and unloving, it tends to suck more out of you than anyone outside of you. Sometimes the best way to get a relationship need met is to be a better friend to yourself.

The basic needs model is simple – but the process is always easier said than done. If you find that the concept I’m writing about makes sense, but you can’t seem to move yourself out of the emotional trap, it might be useful to get some coaching.

I now have an on-line needs assessment available that takes about 20 – 40 minutes to fill out. If you’d like to take a needs assessment, send an e-mail to nahid@aspyrre.com requesting one, and I’d be happy to get you set up.

Copyright © 2007, Nahid Casazza and Aspyrre.