5 Strategies To Deal With A Horrible Co-Worker

Warning! Psychotic co-worker ahead!

Every work place has one. That absolutely impossible, difficult, nasty, backbiting individual who makes it his/her personal mission in life to belittle everyone else and make their life a living hell. Usually people like this are also extremely manipulative and good at managing both HR and their own boss. When you're forced to work with or for one of these human porcupines, here are some strategies that will help you escape the worst of the pokes.

Understanding The Nature Of Work Bullies

To begin, you need to understand how this person got to this place in the first place. It's a little bit nature and a little bit nurture. Every once in awhile this personality type is just plain mean through and through. However, usually nasty behavior stems from a deep personal insecurity about themselves or their ability to perform their job.

Maybe they feel they aren't good enough, maybe they never got an "A" in school, maybe their mom beat them as a child (seriously), for whatever reason they feel inferior and by making you miserable they are bringing you down too. They get perverse satisfaction by doing this. It's a vandal's mentality. Smashing nice things that belong to others is fun.

If they are truly horrible they also chase much of the competition for their job and vertical promotions away. This only makes them even more horrible because they now see concrete rewards for their bad behavior. Before you know it, all office etiquette is thrown out the window and there is an office monster on the loose.

1. Killing Porcupines With Kindness

The number one best strategy for dealing with a nasty co-worker is to kill them with kindness. For every exasperated sigh, provide a smile. For every accusatory rant and rave provide a calm understanding response. Always stand your ground but don't react to their nastiness. After the first or second time you throw kindness in their face the bad behavior should stop.

Best of all, you will get a euphoric feeling inside, "AHA, I've controlled the beast." This will make it easier and easier to keep your calm when confronted with accusations, back stabbing campaigns and ghastly behavior. Best yet, if they keep it up you will make them look like an utter fool.

2. Physically Remove Yourself Whenever Possible

This doesn't mean transfer departments, it means being aware of a negative environment and removing yourself from it. You wouldn't work outside in a snowstorm unless you had to. Why work next to a human tornado? If you have a flexible working environment it will be easier for you to focus on your job if you aren't constantly upset and trying to manage the work bully.

There is a lot to say for out of sight, out of mind. Even noise reduction headphones (turned on or off) can do wonders. Make it clear to your boss that you can be found at all times in your new alternate location. Don't ever give up your territory – just be somewhere else a lot of the time.

3. Don't Get Mad, Get Even

Whenever emotions take over the brain it is almost impossible to think logically and make good decisions. Realize you need to manage your own responses as much as managing the work bully. An easy way to do this is to lay future fantasy plans about ways to get even with the work bully. With every snide remark you can add another imagined revenge.

In all likelihood you will never actually follow through on any of your plans, but if you bide your time there may come a point when you can inflict massive and substantial damage to the work bully and seriously undermine their career. Revenge like this is unbelievably sweet. This sounds evil but think of all the poor future souls you will be protecting.

4. Manage The Tiger, But Never Trust Him / Her

Often the work bully will respond favorably to your kindness and afterwards try to befriend you. No matter how tempting this is (you might actually really come to like them), never trust the Tiger. This is a professional relationship, let it become more and don't be surprised if you get bitten.

5. Avoid Engaging In Teams Of People Against The Bully

The camaraderie may be nice and the nasty battle-ax deserves it, but this type of behavior is unprofessional and against all normal office etiquette. In addition, bullies are uncommonly good at staving off attacks. Fighting is what they do best. Don't assume you and your comrades will end up winning the war.

Thanks to Six Sigma Online / Careerealism
http://www.careerealism.com/deal-horrible-co-worker/

To Get Uninterrupted Daily Article(s) / Review(s) Updates; Kindly Subscribe To This BlogSpot:- http://ZiaullahKhan.Blogspot.com/ Via "RSS Feed" Or " Email Subscription" Or "Knowledge Center Yahoo Group".
Amazon Magazine Subscriptions	Amazon Books	Amazon Kindle Store
Amazon Everyday Low Prices, Sales, Deals, Bargains, Discounts, Best-Sellers, Gifts, Household Consumer Products

 

 

6 Pitfalls Of Copying A Professional Resume

Recently, I was contacted by a job hunter who wanted an update to his existing resume, a service I offer to former clients in my practice.

The resume looked strikingly familiar on some level, but the name didn't resonate.

Then, it hit me: I HAD written it—but for someone else.

Professional resume writers encounter this scenario all the time, and for the most part, it's flattering to think our work is compelling enough to be copied (at least, if we can ignore the obvious part pertaining to copyright law).

However, here's what worries me when I spot a copied rendition of a professional resume (mine or anyone else's): the copier rarely grasps the branding and building process that went behind it in the first place.

Therefore, he's doing himself a grave disservice by borrowing the format, writing style, and tone, then pasting his career story in between that of someone else.

Pitfalls Of Copying A Professional Resume

The worst part? The "borrower" often fails to understand this context, and goes right on using it as if it were a coherent and targeted document. So, if you're determined to make your resume look like the masterpieces that you see on sites like mine, here are six likely problems that you'll encounter in doing so:

1. You Can Easily Unravel The Original Brand Strategy

So… you think you have the same career path and can therefore just "tweak" a word or two? Not so fast.

For a resume to be effective, the strategy is set (prior to any writing) based on how well the candidate fits the desired role and the potential for screen-out factors based on his or her personal career path, age, industry preferences, and a host of other factors.

I often compare a client's career path and achievements to others in the industry, pulling out any areas of strength or weakness in credentials (including education and former jobs) to make decisions about word choice and emphasis.

The writing process itself only starts after lengthy data mining and analysis of the job goal. Then, content is wrapped around and woven through the strategy, along with personality traits, resulting in a total picture and unique value proposition.

Given this process, any changes to the resume by someone who doesn't understand the candidate will create problems in the message… and while these nuances may go unnoticed by you, they are all key factors in whether a resume gets read or dismissed.

2. You Might Slide Into Generalizations That Blur The Message

Here's what one candidate did with my power summary that described market-leading achievements (including a 70% rise in revenue over 2 years, a totally restructured team and profitable turnaround effort, plus a total obliteration of the competition):

"Dedicated and hard working professional with over 12 years of experience in the food service sales and marketing industry, Successful experience in strategic planning, analysis of results, and international media relations."

Ouch.

Now, if you haven't read lists of overused words for resumes, it might be time to do so.

Words like "hardworking" or "successful experience" are both no-brainers and would not be taken seriously by employers… plus, they're a dead giveaway the writer doesn't know what he is doing when trying to describe himself.

3. You Could Repeat Yourself

And put words like "created," "spearheaded," and "developed" in the document so many times that they'll lose their meaning.

Hopefully, you'll refrain from describing all your achievements as "successful" and reference a thesaurus to avoid using the same word four times in one sentence (as I recently saw in a copied document).

Here's where training in power verbs can really save the day.

Not convinced? Most professional writers count word occurrences (yes, really) and tend to scan documents for our favorite words, just to ensure employers remain fully engaged in your resume.

4. Your Changes Can Mess Up The Formatting

Professional resume writers are masters of presentation and formatting, to the point that they'll incorporate tricks and nuances into a resume that escape your untrained eye.

In fact, just moving a sentence or two will often throw an entire page into disarray, because you'll be challenged by figuring out how to adjust headings or change point sizes for spacer lines.

Worse yet, you might feel the need to shrink the font below 11 points. This should only be done for certain sans serif fonts, and then reviewed on different monitors to verify that the over-40 crowd of employers can read your document.

5. Your Writing Might Suck Up Space (Or Not Make Sense)

Professional resume writers specialize in something your English teacher never approved of: sentence fragments. That's right – we boil ideas and full sentences down to the most minute of details in order to avoid that font problem that I just described.

Best practices in journalism (you didn't know that resume writers use the Associated Press Stylebook, now did you?) dictate that sentences must be short, conveying meaning in the first 5 to 10 words. (25-word sentences are held up as the Holy Grail.)

So, with minimal practice in tight writing, your sentences might be as long as the one I just reviewed in a copied resume: 79 words!

It's close to impossible for your resume to pass a 10-second scan with a dense paragraph like this.

In addition, lack of parallel sentence structure is a dead giveaway that your resume wasn't professionally written. Parallel structure means that your sentences are written in alignment with each other (such as fragments that all begin with nouns, or verb forms that consistently appear in past tense).

6. There Won't Be Any Way To Update Your "Work" Professionally

Your personal work style and energy will rarely (if ever) show up in someone else's document. So, you're already operating at a severe brand disadvantage before even trying to have someone update the resume for you.

Think about it: you started with someone else's strategy, brand message, tone, and presentation, and tried to plop a mixed bag of verbiage over the original text.

Now, it really doesn't represent you, and this will make it difficult for a professional resume writer to make sense of it without starting fresh (which would have been my advice in the first place).

In summary, you can certainly TRY to adopt a professionally written resume as your own, but the pitfalls that can trip you up along the way can actually hurt your job search results.

You're better off pulling in some formatting styles that appeal to you, and writing about your own career history—from scratch.

Thanks to Laura Smith-Proulx / Careerealism
http://www.careerealism.com/copying-professional-resume/

To Get Uninterrupted Daily Article(s) / Review(s) Updates; Kindly Subscribe To This BlogSpot:- http://ZiaullahKhan.Blogspot.com/ Via "RSS Feed" Or " Email Subscription" Or "Knowledge Center Yahoo Group".
Amazon Magazine Subscriptions	Amazon Books	Amazon Kindle Store
Amazon Everyday Low Prices, Sales, Deals, Bargains, Discounts, Best-Sellers, Gifts, Household Consumer Products