Your description of a colleague became a rule for working with them. How did that happen? And will that help?
How Handling Rules Form
Colleagues truly can be difficult, and let’s say your judgment is fair. She’s negative. He challenges everything you say. Someone doesn’t follow through. The thing is, there’s more going on.
She’s negative so you’ve stopped asking what she thinks. He challenges everything you say so you make your point once and stop engaging. Someone doesn’t follow through so you just do it yourself.
What you know and do can fuse into a handling rule. Into something that feels like one thing, not two. Just a single knowing-doing move you make – and should make – that feels right. Inevitable. Just what the situation calls for.
Let’s call that knowing-doing experience gut feeling. To me that’s a capability to judge – to apprehend, discern, and calibrate – in real-time, toward a purpose, in ways not fully articulable in the moment. It’s one way you sense what’s happening, what it means, and what to do, all without necessarily having words available to explain your reasoning.1This is my definition, not one from any philosophical or scientific school of thought. It’s intentionally functional rather than mechanistic in order to side-step unsettled debates about what a gut feeling is and how it works. I also talk about gut feeling in two ways. As a capability which just is, which doesn’t come and go. And as a feeling or experience – as what the capability produces for you to notice – which can come and go. Phenomenologically – meaning how your experience feels – gut feelings can arise quickly while interacting with someone (and also while imagining or recalling interactions), with varying degrees of strength. You don’t have to do anything to have gut feelings. They come unbidden as part of how your brain and body process information to prepare you to act. But do you bring something to your gut feeling? Or is it a readout of a situation?2Different explanations exist for what gut feelings are, how they happen, and why. Implicit learning, tacit knowledge, recognition-primed judgment, heuristics and biases, embodied cognition and interoception, somatic markers, predictive processing, and dual-processing are some. I’ll talk about some of these in other content, but they’re not debates you or I need to settle to use gut feeling – or any theory about it – for your better collaboration and conflict handling.
When knowing and doing collapse into one, when you know what you’ll do without thinking about it with words, you’re bringing something to the moment. And you’ve seen this in yourself.
Your negative colleague sighs before you’ve finished explaining an idea. You already know that sigh. Before she says a word, you have a sense of where this is going – and what you’re going to do about it.
Or your colleague who challenges everything leans forward and says, “But…” You feel yourself tighten. Here we go again. You’re ready to defend your point, shorten the conversation, stop engaging.
Your negative colleague could sigh and say, Let’s think about that. Your challenging colleague could say, But… that might have a chance. If you hoped for that, you brought hope to the moment. If you were ready for negativity and challenges, you brought that to the moment. It’s not that a colleague isn’t negative or challenging, or that you should “reframe” their behavior to work with them.
It’s that you bring something to the interaction which your gut feeling might not label This is yours! You actually bring two things – and they affect how you handle yourself in collaboration and conflict moments.
Rule Need Not Handle You
One thing you bring to the moment I’ll call content. Prior experience, expectations, wants, fears, purposes, knowledge of this colleague, assumptions, learned patterns, etc. Your content participates in what the gut feeling is and in how you interact with others in that moment or situation.
The second is what weight a gut feeling has for you. This takes the content of your gut feeling and asks, how much does it count for what I do next? Confidence, uncertainty, and confusion feel different – feel authoritative to different degrees – and shape what happens next in different ways.
This brings us back to your handling rule.
Your colleague might actually be negative. Your judgment might be fair. And your gut feeling might tell you something worth knowing. None of that answers how much authority you want to give your gut feeling over what you do next.
You don’t have to get rid of a gut feeling, distrust it, or replace it with a better one. You can notice its content and weight and ask What’s my gut doing? What am I bringing to this moment? How much does it count for what I do next?
You might decide your gut nailed it and you’ve given it exactly the authority it should have – or too much, or too little. The difference is that you’ve had intentional, explicit say in it – so your description of your colleague can still be true without becoming the rule for working with them.
Test Drive
- Think of a colleague you’ve described to yourself more than once as negative, defensive, unreliable, controlling, whatever fits. Can you identify anything you’ve started doing, or stopped doing, because of that description? Compare to a colleague you consider likable, thoughtful, helpful, or engaged.
- Think of a time you had a strong gut feeling about a colleague – good or bad. What did you already know, expect, want, or want to avoid in that moment? Can you tell whether any of that mattered to what the moment felt like?
The idea here is to test my ideas, not to test yourself. Reflection might answer questions – or raise more questions than you can answer. Both can help you understand how you orient yourself to work collaboration and conflict, and how you navigate them.