Are You Playing Playground Games?

When you were a kid, do you remember playing tag, hot potato, It, Bulldog etc in the playground? Great fun I reckon, and they should have more of it in schools now.

But I can also remember a bunch of other playground games that weren’t quite so much fun like bullying, cliques and lots of leaving people out to make them feel bad (I definitely got a bit of that).

The funny thing is this:

When you leave school you kind of think that all that is going to stop, and you will be relieved of the pain of having to plough through the swamp of petty behaviour and nastiness.

But, no sooner do you leave than it seems to start up again with a vengeance. And this is not in the school playground – but in a so-called professional work place!

Maybe you have felt this first hand and experienced the petty and unpleasant members of your team making life damned miserable for yourself or some other unsuspecting team member. Or was it that you were the boss and you have torn your hair out at the fact that the team are fighting like cats and dogs instead of doing their job?

Have you ever just wanted to shake those two trainees who are bitching and whining about each other or even needed to remove one from the situation because it was causing so much grief?

Maybe that is happening to you or your business right now?

Well I am sad to say that you are in good company. There are literally thousands of managers out there with high blood pressure and a stressed look on their face because this is exactly what is happening in their business too. So, you are not alone….. but that actually makes it even worse.

Last month I spoke to no less than 5 clients who had issues with the childish behaviour of their staff (and another couple of clients who were being the child).

So why are they doing it and what can you do about it?

Well, in order to understand what is going on, one tool I find very useful is the model of Transactional Analysis. That makes it sound complicated, but it is not.

Imagine that we all have 3 ego states to walk around with each day. Parent, Adult and Child. Now, you would imagine that we (as grown-ups) would come to the party in our ego state of “adult”, wouldn’t you? But, hey presto, we often don’t.

We come as the “Child” or worse still, “parent”! When your boss talks to you like you are a child, how do you feel? Or imagine at a meeting, “Bob, the sales director” sits in a sulk because he didn’t get his way, so you get frustrated and say he is “throwing his teddies out the pram”. We say this because “Bob” is coming to the meeting in his child ego state and that means that you are never going to get out of him or everyone else in that meeting, what you need. Your boss, at that moment, is in parent state and that is very uncomfortable and totally demotivating.

So, unless everyone turns up as the “adult” in the room, we get a very weird dynamic of people being turned off by other people’s behaviour and those people reacting in a painful way to it all. All in all, what we get is a load of people hating what they do and having a bloody awful day at work.

And that means only one thing…. the business suffers.

So, just this one change in mindset and behaviour – turning up as an ‘adult’, can totally change the way the whole team works together and gets on with the job in hand.

Doesn’t that sound great?

But it is something that takes a bit of work to sort out and that is where you come in.

Because other people’s behaviour feeds off your impact. Which means that you CAN do something about it. It might be simple, but it is not always easy, and luckily it’s what I love to do!

So, if you need some help with that, give me a shout and I will be happy to help you to help your business be more productive, and have happy “grown-up” staff who focus on what needs doing rather than playing silly playground games.