Breaking Toxic Cycles at Work

Caught up in a vicious cycle that starts with frustration, leads to stress, and winds up causing workplace wars? This can engender more frustration, until the whole syndrome starts over. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Annie McKee, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and the director of the PennCLO Executive Doctoral Program, offers a three-step process for interrupting such vicious cycles):
 

1. Develop self-awareness: Understand your triggers. Learning what causes you to feel thwarted, scared, or threatened and what drives you to the battleground can help you get a grip on your reactions.
2. Employ emotional self-control: Once you’re aware of the emotions that drive your behavior, you can employ emotional self-control, checking and channeling your emotions so that you don’t get stuck in a permanent fight or flight response.
3. Build friendships at work: To minimize stress and conflict at work, we need to stop seeing each other in terms of what we can get and replace it with what we can give. This shift would result in less stress and fewer negative emotions. It would also lead to warmer, friendlier relationships — something most people need and want at work.

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“Developing self-awareness, increasing your emotional self-control, and recharging relationships at work takes commitment,” says McKee. To lay the foundation, build mindfulness practices into your daily life, schedule time for self-reflection, and tap into empathy that allows you to see the world through others’ eyes.
 
Have you found that taking more responsibility for your own feelings and actions can help reduce frustration, stress, and conflict? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

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