Managing Negativity at Work

Unfortunately, negativity is a natural part of wokring in a business environment. There is often discontent in some form or another and a good leader recognises this. By developing an inclusive approach to leadership and involving your team in decision making processes it is possible that the likelihood of negativity arising is minimised, but you should be prepared to deal with it when it does appear as even the most effective leader will run into negativity at some point in their career. The big problem is that negativity can be contagious and once it rears its head, can be very difficult to manage.

Sometimes negativity will arise as a result of company processes or changes required to make an organisation more effective. It can also arise over time for what appears to be no obvious reason.

An organisation that is in the grip of negativity will display an increase in the amount of complaining, a focus on why things cannot be done, a ‘what’s in it for me’ attitude and a view that things will never get better.

When negativity arises, it can sap your energy as a leader and potentially pull you into its grasp. A great leader will use simple techniques to manage negativity in the workplace and ensures their own attitude remains positive and focused.

The following suggestions will help you to overcome negativity when it arises:

Acknowledge negativity

Negativity will not go away if you ignore it, in fact it will most likely get worse. If it is not acknowledged, you will lose credibility as a leader. Discuss the negative feelings with those concerned, show that you care and ask for suggestions on how you might overcome the issue.

Identify the positives in all situations

It is easy to be dismissive and ignore the input from our team members. Celebrate the small victories and where suggestions will not work, try and identify the elements that you can work on. Positive actions are often a result of lots of little actions rather than one big one.

Give positive recognition often

This is something that is often overlooked and leaders can fall into the trap of considering the efforts of their team as ‘part of their role’. Everybody likes to be recognised for their success, so be prepared to acknowledge it at every opportunity.

Avoid colluding on negativity

This can be hard! We all like to have a moan about things. However, by remaining upbeat and positive, we put out the flames of negativity before they start.

Focus on issues, not personalities

When you are addressing negativity head on, you should remove the focus from the person and instead look at the issue at hand. Otherwise you risk undermining that person and might escalate the negativity.

Understand their feelings

Put yourself in the shoes of the person who feels negative. This does not mean for you to become negative too, but for you to understand how they might feel in this situation and resolve it accordingly.

Express your ideas and feelings

Don’t be scared to let people know how you feel and provide an insight into what you are thinking. Most negative issues can be resolved when everyone is open and honest about their feelings.

Be willing to compromise

As long as the new position is fair, you lose nothing by moving your stance slightly on an issue to ensure all parties are happy. Just because you are the leader, it does not mean that you cannot modify your position.

It’s not unusual for organisations to go through periods of negativity. How long that negativity progresses is often down to you as a leader. By displaying the correct attitudes and behaviours, you are likely to managing negativity and stop it from becoming an inherent problem. With an open and honest approach to the workplace, you might even remove the likelihood of negativity arising in the first place.

This article is taken from an excerpt in the training course materials, 'Great Leadership', which are available to buy from our website - Trainer Bubble training course materials. Visit today for this and many other great training courses.

Why conflict can be difficult to resolve

The main reason that conflicts are so difficult to resolve is that they are predominantly influenced by emotions. When emotions like anger and resentment are felt it is often difficult for people to behave rationally. The likelihood of the person understanding the others point of view diminishes as their own strong emotions take over.

Emotions play a role in how people make sense of their relationships, concept of power, and social status. People constantly evaluate situations and events to work out if they are personally relevant. These understandings and appraisals are infused with various emotions and feelings. So, emotion not only serves a side effect of conflict, but also frames the way in which parties understand and define their dispute.

Secondly, within the context of relationships, emotions typically express people's agendas, desires, and goals. When people perceive that they have incompatible goals or that others are interfering with their desires and pursuits, this elicits emotions and leads to conflict.


Imagine an iceberg, a small percentage is above the iceberg and visible, while a large part is below the water line and obscured from view. The small part represents our behaviour; we can see and hear it.

Just below the surface is our emotions – we can neither see nor hear them, but we can often guess how we and others are feeling by observing the behaviours. For example; when someone is smiling, we can guess they are happy, when they frown we guess they are sad etc.

If we go deeper down the iceberg we get to a place that represents the things that are most important to us: our needs and interests. These are the things that drive our emotions and in turn cause us to act and react the way we do when in conflict.

When dealing with conflict it is tempting to overlook the emotional aspect and often we are told to treat things only from an objective point of view. This is dangerous and usually leads to failure. Our aim should be to identify that emotions play a part and look for methods of addressing the emotive issues. Only then can we overcome the substantive needs of those involved.

This article is an excerpt from the training materials for trainers called 'Conflict Handling', which are available from our website at Trainer Bubble. Visit us today and buy this fantastic resource.

The Manager as Coach

In my role as consultant, I am often asked whether all good managers are effective coaches and if so, does this lead to the opposite being true.

To answer these questions with any great authority, it is important to define what is required of a manager when performing the role of coach. In order to do this, it is best to examine all management activity of which there are three key areas: Managing, Leading and Coaching.

These three activities are complimentary and are required to help a good manager achieve their business objectives, by enabling a team to perform at their best. You could refer to these skills as the legs of a stool on which a good manager sits.

When leading; the manager creates and shares a vision of the future with their team and ensures that their activities are consistent with bringing about that change.

When managing; they deliver results to the organisation by controlling the work of the team and agreeing and monitoring such things as budgets, timescales and quality levels.

When coaching; they support team members in their learning, to enable them to develop the skills, knowledge and attitude necessary to successfully deliver their job responsibilities and goals.

It is important to note that these three elements overlap because some of the processes and skills that are used in one area are also used in another. There may be times when the manager needs to use coaching skills to help their team understand and take ownership of quality levels or times when management of budgets requires strong leadership and vision.

Problems arise when the manager is not clear about which approach is appropriate in a particular situation. For example, if a coaching approach is used when deadlines are tight or a crisis has arisen, precious time may be lost. If a management approach is used when a team member has made a mistake, the learning opportunity will be missed and the mistake may be repeated.

All this boils down to the simple fact that coaching is incredibly important to a manager’s role and to be truly effective, they should acquire this valuable skill. However, if they neglect the requirements of management and leadership, they will ultimately fail.

So, to answer the original questions; Are all good managers effective coaches? I suspect so. Does that make all effective coaches good managers? Not unless you can sit on a one legged stool!

This Article is adapted from our training course 'Coaching at Work', which is available from our website at Trainer Bubble.

We also provide business consultancy in areas such as leadership, coaching and effective business development. You can discover more about the wealth of services offered by Trainer Bubble at our website Trainer Bubble Services

E-Mail Success - By Wolfgang Halliwell

I returned to work today after a 2 week Christmas vacation and opened my inbox with some trepidation. After a similar break last year I had returned form holiday with over 400 e-mails awaiting my attention. It took me a couple of days to deal with these so I vowed there and then that this would never happen again.

One of my New Years resolutions at the beginning of 2007 was to take control of my e-mail inbox. Today would prove one way or the other whether the action I took worked.

I opened my inbox and found only 32 items awaiting me. Thirty minutes later and my inbox was empty. Complete success!

So, what did I do to achieve this? The good news is that this is not rocket science and a few simple steps have achieved this result. The action I took in 2007 included:

1. Always remembering to set my out of office message when I was away for more than a day.


2. Unsubscribing to newsletters and update services unless I really needed them.


3. Agreeing a few ground rules with colleagues about when and when not to use e-mail.


4. Using the telephone a lot more to avoid those unproductive games of e-mail tennis.


5. Delegating or redirecting some of my e-mail to other people when appropriate.

None of this took very long to do but the results have been really spectacular for me. If you suffer from an overfull inbox you might find some of the techniques I have listed are of some help.

Of course, there is also a need to manage your e-mail once you have got it, but that is the topic for another posting.

This article relates to our training course material, 'Managing E-Mails', which you can find on our website by clicking here.