It's All Your Fault at Work!: Managing Narcissists and Other High-Conflict People

By Bill Eddy LCSW Esq. and L. Georgi DiStefano

No, it’s not just your imagination—more and more people in the workplace today have high-conflict personalities. Co-workers, clients, even bosses are behaving in narcissistic or bullying ways, choosing targets and then placing blame on them, treating them with disdain, or otherwise acting in aggressive, inappropriate ways. Some go so far as to spread damaging rumors, harass, or directly sabotage their targets, among other extreme behaviors. These are not people who are just having an occasional bad day; these are people who display a repeated pattern of high-conflict behavior. And they aren’t just difficult; they are the most difficult of people. They can make your life at work stressful, frustrating, and extremely challenging. The good news is that their behavior is not about you—it’s about them. What’s more, you can learn strategies and techniques to deal with them more effectively at work.

Based on Bill Eddy’s high-conflict personality theory, he and co-author, L. Georgi DiStefano, expertly define the problem so you can recognize potential high-conflict people (HCPs) in your own work life. They describe the key characteristics of HCPs and the typical behavior patterns of five main types of high-conflict personalities. Then they walk you through their proactive approach for minimizing conflict and keeping interactions with HCPs as peaceful as possible. You’ll learn about—and see examples of—how to use a simple, proven four-step method to help calm HCPs, analyze your options, respond to hostility, and set limits on extreme behavior. While you cannot ultimately change someone else’s personality, you can adapt your own behavior and respond to the person in different ways that make things better at work for yourself, the high-conflict person, and your organization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781936268672

Book preview

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

HIGH-CONFLICT PEOPLE

IT ’S ALL YOUR FAULT! Sound familiar?

High-conflict people are blamers. They blame anyone, anywhere. They blame people they know well; they blame complete strangers. They might even blame you!

High-conflict people are everywhere and they are increasing. Customers may yell at you. Co-workers may undercut you. A supervisor may be so disdainful to an employee that he or she becomes depressed and physically ill—costing the business thousands of dollars in lost work, health care costs, and low company morale. Business owners may act in extreme ways that inadvertently destroy the businesses that they built and that you relied upon for income, benefits, and retirement.

This book presents ways to manage the behavior of several types of high-conflict people in the workplace. It will help you recognize their predictable patterns of behavior and then use a simple four-step method—called the CARS Method—to calm them, analyze your options, respond to their hostility, and set limits on their extreme behavior.

A Pattern of Behavior

Whether you’re a customer, an employee, a manager, a business owner, or another professional who interacts with people in the workplace, high-conflict behavior can catch you by surprise and make your life miserable—before, during, and after work. Most people with extreme behaviors have a repeated pattern of high-conflict behavior. It’s part of who they are. They didn’t just make a mistake or act badly out of the blue—they have done this before and will do it again.

We think of them as high-conflict people or HCPs (for references to the singular person who is high conflict, we’ll use the abbreviation HCP). They aren’t just difficult. They’re the most difficult people, because their pattern includes the following four key characteristics:

• Preoccupation with blaming others

• All-or-nothing thinking

• Unmanaged emotions

• Extreme behaviors

To make matters worse, they lack insight into their own behavior and how they contribute to their own problems, so they don’t change their own behavior and instead focus intensely on others’ behavior. They sometimes become persuasive blamers, persuading others that the problem at hand really is all someone else’s fault—maybe even all your fault!

Yes, chances are that you will eventually become a target of blame for an HCP. And when someone treats you that way, you end up having to deal with it and them—because they have patterns of behavior that won’t just go away. For example, let’s look briefly at the narcissistic patterns.

Narcissistic HCPs

Today, narcissists are in the news and daily conversation more than ever before. Narcissists are, by definition, self-absorbed and egotistical. However, not all narcissists display the pattern of HCPs; some are simply eager to tell everyone how wonderful they are. But narcissistic HCPs are preoccupied with blaming others. They focus on a target of blame and get an ego boost by making themselves look superior to another. They will pick on their target, manipulate them with charm and anger, or outright blame them or publicly humiliate them—all in an effort to distract others from their own shortcomings or to prove how clever and superior they are (at least in their own minds).

Narcissistic HCPs are just one of five types of HCPs we will talk about in this book. Narcissists are the most common of these personalities, according to a nationwide study we discuss in chapter 3.

Dealing with HCPs

How It Feels to Deal with HCPs

When you’re dealing with an HCP at work—whether the person is narcissistic or another type of HCP—you may feel frustrated, hopeless, enraged, confused, or a lot of other emotions. You may take these feelings home with you and even lose sleep over the high-conflict situation. These are natural fight-or-flight or freeze responses to unrestrained aggressive behavior—a hallmark of HCPs. Yet most of our natural fight-or-flight responses to HCPs often backfire and make things worse. You may have already discovered this.

You Can Successfully Deal with HCPs

We wrote this book to help you deal with high-conflict situations. These often involve one or more HCPs. As frustrating as these individuals are, you will see that they tend to follow predictable patterns of behavior. Once you learn to identify the warning signs of this behavior, you’ll be able to use strategies for dealing with it in effective ways.

These behavior patterns tend to represent five highconflict personalities, which we detail in this chapter. Once you recognize—or even just suspect—that you are dealing with a high-conflict person, you can take a proactive approach to keeping the interaction as peaceful as possible. We have developed a four-step method for dealing with HCPs that helps calm their behavior and focuses them on solving problems. We will describe this CARS Method in chapter 2.

This method isn’t complicated, but It’s often the opposite of what you feel like doing. So practice helps. Therefore, in this book, we have included over a dozen examples of how to apply the CARS Method with potentially high-conflict people.

We have used this method successfully for many years in a wide range of workplace and legal disputes. What is so amazing is that this HCP problem is similar around the world and that the CARS Method works with all types of high-conflict people anywhere. What’s more, it works with people who aren’t highconflict, so you don’t have to worry about identifying them. You can use the CARS Method during your interactions with anyone.

Who Are We?

We have been working with high-conflict people in workplace and legal disputes for over twenty years. We met over twenty-five years ago while working together at a psychiatric hospital and then at an outpatient substance abuse and counseling clinic. After that, Bill went into a legal career as a lawyer and mediator. He combined his mental health, mediation, and legal experience to develop the high-conflict personality theory (the HCP Theory), which he has been explaining to legal professionals for over fifteen years. He has also provided consultations and trainings to workplace professionals. Georgi went on to have more than twenty years of experience as a therapist and director of several outpatient mental health and substance abuse programs, an Employee Assistance Professional (EAP) for health care systems, and a workplace trainer for conflict resolution.

We have given seminars and provided consultations to numerous private businesses, government agencies, universities, managers, and employees about high-conflict people and using the CARS Method to deal with them. This is the first book we have written focused exclusively on using the CARS Method in workplace settings. We wanted to show how it can be applied to any situation—including yours—by understanding what to do and what not to do!

Who Is a High-conflict Person?

Successfully dealing with HCPs requires first understanding them. Let’s start by picturing someone in your life who seems to have a pattern of the four key characteristics of HCPs that we described above. The person you pictured may be a mild example or an extreme example of these characteristics. Make sure you don’t tell the person that you think he or she is a highconflict person!

There is a wide range of high-conflict people—some are much more difficult than others, although you usually cannot tell right away. Was it clear that the person you pictured was an HCP from the start? Or did he or she succeed at work initially, but then have difficulty in close working relationships and during crises? HCPs are sometimes obvious at first, but in many cases their behavior really catches you by surprise.

They don’t respond easily to usual methods of shared problem solving, give-and-take, and negotiation. They have adversarial thinking—without resolution. So their disputes get bigger and bigger, and involve more and more people, resources, and time for everyone around them. Does this description fit your person?

Their four key characteristics get them into frequent conflicts with those nearby—not just at work, but in their families and in their communities as well. This is a frequent pattern of behavior for them; it is part of their personalities—how they regularly think, feel, and act.

Can you picture your high-conflict person clashing with others in every part of his or her life? This is not unusual but it is a sad situation. Sometimes it helps to realize that your HCP is trapped in self-sabotaging behavior, rather than truly wanting to be this way. HCPs just can’t see what they are doing, because they have a barrier against looking at their part in a problem; this means that they don’t change anything that might make it better. They’re preoccupied with other people’s behavior and blaming them for any conflict.

The High-Conflict Personality Pattern

In other words, when there’s a conflict, the issue is often not the issue. Their personality is the real issue and there is an underlying personality pattern that tends to include the following:

1. Rigid and uncompromising. They endlessly repeat the same controlling strategies, even though they did not work or even made things worse the last time.

2. Difficulty accepting or healing loss or defeat. They perceive even the smallest setback as a huge challenge to their self-image.

3. Thinking dominated by negative emotions. Emotions of anger, embarrassment, fear, and jealousy often dominate their thinking.

4. Inability to reflect on their own behavior. They are unable to see how their own behavior contributed to or may have even caused the problem.

5. Difficulty empathizing with others. They are often unable to put themselves in the other person’s place or to view the situation from the other person’s perspective.

6. Preoccupation with "targets of blame." They focus all of their attention on blaming someone else for what happened, instead of moving forward in constructive problem solving. They avoid taking responsibility for their problems or changing their own behavior. They also avoid responsibility for finding solutions to problems, since they don’t feel they played any role in the problems. Instead, they focus on the behavior of others and are preoccupied with confronting them.

Their targets of blame (TOBs) could be anyone—often an unsuspecting person who finds himself or herself in the crosshairs of the HCP and is wrongly blamed. The dispute is not really about the target, or what this person did or didn’t do—although it may look that way at first to others. The dispute is really about the HCP.

HCPs continually seek out targets of blame, because blaming others helps them feel better about themselves—it makes them feel safer and stronger. Yet these positive feelings do not last, and soon they are in distress again and back to blaming others. This pattern of behavior is automatic and often unconscious, meaning they are blind to what they are doing and totally unaware of its negative, self-defeating effects. You should not try to convince them that they have a problem, or they will make your life much, much worse.

7. Constantly recruiting negative advocates to help them attack their targets. Surprisingly, HCPs routinely feel weak, vulnerable, and powerless inside, even though they may appear (and be) very aggressive with others. Many of them complain a lot to anyone who will listen. They are constantly in search of allies who will become their negative advocates— people who will fight for them and excuse their high-conflict behavior. Negative advocates can be anyone—friends, family, and even colleagues or other professionals.

Negative advocates are usually uninformed about the HCP’s full behavior but are emotionally hooked into the drama by the HCP’s charm, anger, hurt, fear, and other emotions. Sometimes negative advocates are also HCPs, but more often they are just ordinary people who have been around the HCP’s emotional intensity long enough to get emotionally hooked—because emotions are contagious and high-conflict emotions are highly contagious.

Then, negative advocates become charged up and join the HCP in attacking the target of blame. This can be a shock, especially when the negative advocate is someone with credibility in the workplace, even though the HCP sometimes lacks credibility himself or herself.

8. May appear charming, intelligent, attractive, helpful, and not like an HCP. high-conflict people often slip under the radar. They usually don’t look like HCPs—at least not at first. But once they are having a problem or are in a conflict with someone, they may reveal intense emotions and extreme thinking and behavior that can surprise those around them.

Being a high-conflict person has nothing to do with intelligence. There are very bright HCPs, as well as those who are not so smart. The high-conflict personality pattern is about relationships and conflict—not about intelligence—which is why even smart HCPs can act so badly.

Common High-Conflict Behaviors at Work

These dynamics lead HCPs into a wide range of repeated highconflict behavior with their targets of blame (TOB):

Behaving uncooperatively (often passive-aggressively)

Being uncivil

Bullying

Spreading rumors

Purposefully misrepresenting the TOB

Sabotaging work projects to make the TOB look bad

Creating mistrust with employees regarding the TOB

Playing employees against each other to heighten turmoil

Making personal attacks in public

Harassing others: sexually, physically, or otherwise

Filing lawsuits without merit

Making serious threats of violence

Committing actual violence

These behaviors often trigger responses in others (especially their targets of blame) that also look like high-conflict behavior. This is why co-workers, employers, and outsiders often mistake the target as a high-conflict person and miss what the truly high-conflict person has done or continues to do. For this reason, it is very important to use the CARS Method, rather than just reacting and blaming the high-conflict person, so that you don’t look like an HCP.

Continuum of Normal and High-Conflict Personalities

At this point, It’s important to point out that there is a wide continuum of personality-based behavior when it comes to dealing with conflicts. See Figure 1. People with personalities in the normal range have normal, problem-solving responses to difficult situations, more or less. People with high-conflict personalities have a repeated pattern of high-conflict responses, more or less. Some people are less high-conflict than others and therefore somewhat less difficult. Some normal people may look high-conflict occasionally. There isn’t a clear dividing line, so It’s best to think of this behavior as occurring on a continuum of difficulty. It’s also helpful to remember that you can use the CARS Method with anyone at any time, although It’s more important to use it with HCPs because normal responses (attempts at gaining insight, offering negative feedback, and becoming angry) often makes the situation worse.

Figure 1: Personality Continuum Overview

© 2015 by Bill Eddy and L. Georgi DiStefano

However, it helps to recognize the basic differences between high-conflict personalities and normal personalities. Figure 2 gives a good overview of this. high-conflict personalities are reactive based more on their personalities rather than situations, and tend toward more extreme responses. But they are still on a continuum of more or less difficult people.

Figure 2: Detailed Personality Continuum

© 2015 by Bill Eddy and L. Georgi DiStefano

Five High-Conflict Personality Styles

The following five personality patterns commonly appear in high-conflict workplace disputes. We’ll include examples of each pattern in this book, helping you see why these individuals continually get into conflicts with those close to them and with people above and below them in any organization. As you read the descriptions, think about whether the person you were picturing above seems to fit into any one (or more) of these patterns.

Narcissistic HCPs

These individuals can be very arrogant and preoccupied with themselves. They try hard to be seen as superior to others and very important. They seek constant admiration and praise, and get angry when they don’t receive it. They can be highly manipulative and very disdainful and demeaning to those around them. When they feel insulted or disrespected (even if they aren’t), they can become enraged, vindictive, and sometimes violent.

They may make false statements and spread rumors about others to regain a sense of control when they feel powerless and inferior. They also engage in splitting those around them, viewing some as superior and as others as inferior. It’s not unusual for them to treat those below them in a very disdainful and disrespectful manner, while treating those above them in a very charming and helpful way. (Kissing up and kicking down.)

They often seek positions of power over others and may initially be very attractive and persuasive as group leaders, but they often crash and burn when a lot is expected of them. Some at the end of the continuum have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and seem to have an underlying fear of being seen as helpless or inferior. However, not all people with NPD are high-conflict people, because they don’t focus on a target of blame.

For more information about each of these personalities and their dynamics, see Bill’s book It’s All Your Fault! 12 Tips for Managing People Who Blame Others for Everything.

Angry (Borderline) HCPs

People who are angry and high conflict have extreme mood swings—acting surprisingly friendly and loving one minute and angry and blaming the next. They are preoccupied with fears of abandonment. When they feel abandoned (even if they aren’t), they can become enraged, vindictive, and sometimes violent. They can