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5 Tips for Reasoning with a Bull-Terrier Boss

Guest post by: Todd Linaman

Article Overview: Most people have at some point in their lives had to deal with someone who refuses to lose. No matter how unreasonable their position and how obviously wrong these people may be, they clamp down their jaws as unthinkingly as a bull terrier in a dogfight – and it seems nothing short of death will loosen it.

5 Tips for Reasoning with a Bull-Terrier Boss

Most people have at some point in their lives had to deal with someone who refuses to lose. No matter how unreasonable their position and how obviously wrong these people may be, they clamp down their jaws as unthinkingly as a bull terrier in a dogfight – and it seems nothing short of death will loosen it.

It’s easy to deal with this sort of person at a dinner party, where the simplest strategy may be to avoid them or to feign agreement for a couple of hours until you can escape with relief after dessert. But in the workplace this is seldom possible, and if the guilty party is your superior, you can come away from such encounters very much the worse for wear.

William Uri, author of Getting Past No, provides five steps to surviving an encounter with a bull-terrier boss, based on the underlying motivations for their intractable resistance to cooperation. Here are five tips to help you achieve a win-win situation.

1. Control your Reaction

Your opponent’s dog-eat-dog style no doubt creates a chain-reaction of frustration and anger that explodes into uncontrolled retaliation – or alternatively a pseudo-surrender just to get the encounter over with. But these reactions play into the win-lose power game, encouraging your opponent’s belligerent behaviour, and raising the chances of future failure. The solution: stay mentally balanced and focused on the outcome you would like to achieve with the negotiation.

2. Defuse their Antagonism

The next step is to try and bring your opponent into the same balanced mental space that you are striving for. This requires breaking through the negative emotions that reinforce his or her antagonism – such as defensiveness, fear, suspicion and hostility. Once you’ve broken through this resistance, you have created a positive negotiating climate in which they may even listen to what you have to say.

3. Change the Rules

You know the bull-terrier’s instinctive tactics – the things that beat you every time. To get past these, you need to change the rules of the game. You need to not resist but to neutralize or find pathways through the aggression, stone-walling and railroading. Once you achieve this, you can hope to break through the one-upmanship into a space where you can solve problems rather than jostling for power positions.

4. Make ‘Yes’ Easy

Once you break through into a problem-solving space, you need to overcome his tendency to believe that agreeing with you will offer no benefit to him. This means erasing the perceived chasm between his position and yours, and making your desired outcome appear to be a victory for your opponent. If you can convince them they have won, you are almost there.

5. Make ‘No’ Difficult

Your final blow consists in weakening your opponent’s resolve to fight. Here you need to use all your negotiating power to persuade him or her to cooperate, but – and this is key – without flaunting your position of power. Remember that when you play the power game, all your efforts to coerce actually strengthen your opponent’s resistance. Use your power to educate your opponent about the sensible course of action rather than trying to beat the bull-terrier at its own game.

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Article Tags: boss, critical people, difficult boss, difficult people, management, managing up



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