The Complexities of Human Behaviour

I have been around the block quite a fair bit in my 57 years of existence. I can say that I have met all sorts of people, good and bad, who have helped me sharpen my EQ skills over time. But once in a while, someone comes along and surprises me again.

I usually leverage on my past experiences to try to dissect the situation and identify the key aspects of behaviour I have to address. After all, I have been on the sales and marketing side for more than 30+ years and have managed team members before. Because of my career, I usually say I am a bullshit marketer when asked to introduce myself LOL.

But this week, I encountered new lessons in the complexities of human behaviour. My interaction with 2 such persons required me to call up all my past experiences to try to determine how I have to deal with them.

The first person was someone I started to know much better only in the last 2 months as I started work. He was a bit of a character whom I was warned that could be hard to manage. Things started on a strong note as we bonded over the past 8 weeks. We were driven by the same career goals and it seems we could work well as a team.

Then something happened a few weeks ago over a confrontational meeting where strong words were exchanged. The decision of a change in corporate strategy was a point he found hard to accept. He pondered and vexed over it for the last few weeks and decided that it was not what he wanted. Things boiled over this week and he suddenly decided to abandon ship, packed up his stuff and left.

While I was trying to get over the shock decision from him, I had to scramble to update management and plan for the next steps. In hindsight, his behaviour had changed in the past week, from showing enthusiasm to being less responsive and even silent at times. I had a gut feeling the weekend before that there could be such a reaction from him and actually discussed it with someone about it a few weeks.

Anyway, I had to go into damage control and try to end things amicably while being professional about it all. Hopefully, the negotiation can be finalized next week and we can move on. I just don’t understand why an incident can eat into him to make him cut losses and run so dramatically. It had shined a bad light on him and showed a level of immaturity. Talking to others who know him, it seems that he has had a pattern of such career behaviour for the past 10+ years to quit and run.

I had been trying to get to know him better over the last 2 months and all this is going down the drain now. I thought that I had figured out what motivates him and what buttons to press but I was wrong. We now have to look for a replacement and I have to start all over again.

The other person I met this week who intrigued me was someone who assumed a lot about me from the get-go even though we had hardly known each other. He tried to get me to do something I was not comfortable with and I refused. His rapid-fire style of communication was at times off-putting and he was not a very good listener too.

He tried to explain to me who he was and the many flaws he had plus a number of failed marriages. But that should not justify his continued obnoxious behaviour. He kept on saying “I understand” when he did not. The 2 words were just like a punctuation pause for him to distract and move on to another topic. His attention span is too short for a meaningful conversation even though he is smart and very sharp.

I simply refused to do what he wanted me to do the next day after only a 30-minute introduction session the previous day. He then backtracked to do damage control by offering to explain his actions, saying he perfectly understood why I stood my ground. He insists that this is who he is and how his mentors trained him to explain away his aggressive behaviour to succeed at all costs. That was really a red flag for me. He can be a loose cannon that can get out of control.

I must be out of touch after not having worked full-time for 6 years. My part-time consultancy work during this period also did not require me to have to maintain a long-term strategy of getting to know people better at work. This week woke me up again to the complexities and intricacies of human behaviour which I will have to sharpen my saw again to deal with the dog-eat-dog commercial world.