Get Mad But Don’t Get Even - Turn an Insult Into a Favor
January 14th, 2008 (6:00am) Edit Staff 16 Comments
By Pete Johnson, HP.com Chief Architect
You don’t have to be in the work force too long before someone ultimately insults you in some way. Maybe it isn’t even intentional, but that doesn’t take the sting out of it. The most basic, knee jerk human reaction when we experience something like this is to get angry and hurl something similar right back at the offending party.
While natural, that perfectly understandable course of action tends to inflame the situation instead of improve it. Is there a better way?
Sometimes, there can be and you can get something much more than revenge of a such a situation, like a better relationship with someone that becomes more useful later.
It starts innocently enough
Last spring, I was asked to be part of a task force whose members were drawn from all over HP. Our mission was to define the key aspects of Web 2.0 that the company wanted to take advantage of, so our group was a mix of technologists like myself and people in charge of a variety of business initiatives for the company.
At the beginning of about our 3rd meeting, I was among the first people who dialed into the teleconference line. Some of the other attendees were discussing some of the topics we wrapped up the last meeting with as we were waiting for everybody to arrive, but I muted myself as I was finishing up something else.
As the meeting was about set to start, a rather influential individual came onto the call and joined in on the banter, let’s call him Ewan. The topic turned to which organization should write a particular piece of functionality. Rather quickly, Ewan emphatically chimed in with, “Nobody from <organization that Pete works for> knows how to write any code!” Then an awkward pause came followed by him timidly saying, “Uh, are any of those guys on the call?”
Turn around what could be an awkward moment
Now, my initial reaction was to completely jump down Ewan’s throat. It was bad enough that he’d insulted the entire organization of people I work regularly with, but he did it in front of a pretty wide cross section of people throughout the company. He’d impinged on the reputation of a lot of people and he deserved to hear about it.
But as I took myself off mute to fill the uncomfortable silence that filled the conference line, I realized that if I reacted how I wanted to I risked looking like an even bigger jerk myself. So I went the other way.
“I think what you meant to say,” I said calmly, “is that nobody from <organization that Pete works for> knows how to write any code . . . . except for Pete.”
That got a big laugh from everyone on the phone and completely diffused the tension that the Ewan’s comment created. Immediately after the meeting ended, Ewan called me directly and was incredibly apologetic. He had just come from another rather heated meeting, let his emotions from that call carry over to the next one, and said things he shouldn’t have. Ewan concluded the call by telling me that if there were anything he could do for me, to let him know.
This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship
Fast forward to the end of the summer and I was eligible to move up to the next pay grade in our salary structure. At this particular level, there was a review process I had to go through that included having to secure letters of recommendation from sources beyond the immediate organization I worked for. Much to my delight, Ewan wrote me the best letter I submitted and it made a huge difference in my getting approved.
Now, a lot of things could have gone wrong here. As our Web 2.0 project went on, Ewan and I developed a great working relationship and he was a big enough person to go out of his way to be nice to me after I let him off the hook for his poor behavior. As it turned out, he’s a good guy who had a bad moment and we have a great relationship now that was sparked by that one uncomfortable incident. A lesser person could have continued to be a jerk and likely not written me the letter of recommendation later.
But, by deflecting the insult, despite that not being my first reaction, I was able to kindle a relationship that I otherwise could not have. That insult got turned into a favor and the payoff was much, much better than getting even would have been.
How about you? Is there a time where you were able to take an awkward or insulting situation and use it to spark a relationship?
About the Author:
Between creating one of the first web applications ever built within Hewlett-Packard during the mid 1990’s and reaching his current position as HP.com’s Chief Architect, Pete Johnson has worked with over 400 engineers all over the world, written technical articles for publications, and presented at trade shows. He blogs about how improved non-technical skills can accelerate technical careers at http://blog.nerdguru.net.
16 Comments Post your own comment
HipShott says: January 14th, 2008 7:06am
Sooo. Good for you. I seem to just take it on the chin, and bury it inside. Not real healthy. I was working for a company that had a mature but first time CEO. Very insecure person….anyway I left after about 18 months, on what I thought was good terms. Only to hear that this CEO (who I reported to directly) was bad mouthing me in company meetings, and to business partners (who I still deal with). Fortunately my reputation exceeds his insecure, vain criticism. But Austin is a small town!
Hmmm glad I got that off my chest.
I have been tempted to confront him several times as we run into each other all around town…..Any thoughts on that type of getting even ? ;)
Tip on Conflict Avoidance. The Strength of Good Humor! « FoundRead says: January 14th, 2008 9:00am
[...] great post on our sister site WedWorkerDaily today, by Pete Johnson, Chief Architect at HP.com: Get Mad But Don’t Get Even – Turn an Insult Into a Favor . It’s funny and astute, offering a great example for how to turn a potentially uncomfortable [...]
Pete Johnson says: January 14th, 2008 6:00pm
@HipShott - Thanks for the comment, I really appreciate it!
It’s never fun to hear about people trashing you behind your back. This CEO you used to work for doesn’t sound like someone you’d want on your Christmas card list, to be sure. I think you have to judge what you might get out of confronting this person.
My initial reaction upon reading your comment was “take the high road and don’t get into it with them.” But as I thought about it more, it depends. In your situation, your reputation is being trashed in an ongoing manner, so that makes it slightly different than what I experienced in the story above.
If it’s only to make you feel better for a few minutes by letting your justifiable anger out on this CEO, that’s probably not a good enough reason. If, however, you think the confrontation might stop the behavior, it might be worth it. You could stop the bleeding your reputation is suffering from and it sounds like the person isn’t going to be doing you favors any time soon anyway so you don’t have much to lose.
I think the key, though, is how you approach the situation. If you are calm and present a lot of supporting facts, that’s always better than using a heavy dose of screaming. At least, that never seems to work for me 8).
I hope that doesn’t sound monumentally stupid on my part. Good luck with it!
Pete Johnson
HP.com Chief Architect
Personal blog: http://nerdguru.net
Renita Lovell says: January 14th, 2008 7:16pm
Loved the article. In the mid-1990s, while managing an application that served Procter & Gamble’s (a big HP customer) 45 US Shipping sites, I once had a plant manager, one of 45 that I supported, chewing up the time on a conference call to deal with an unreliable messaging service between two integrated applications. The plant manager barked out “I’ve got 150 people pushing brooms” - I quickly replied - “Quick, send them to my house.” When I left in March of 2000, the P&G manager responsible for the unreliable messaging system told me how much that one comment meant. It really helped get the customer off his rant so the vendor could fix the issue.
Ben Nasca says: January 14th, 2008 8:08pm
Pete,
I’ve got to commend you on the course of action you followed. I think it was St.Paul who said, “Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Knowing what “good” to substitute for that “evil” takes a little creativity and imagination, but you pulled it off. I hope
many more will follow your lead.
Alan Gutierrez says: January 15th, 2008 4:43am
Very nice story and great point to illustrate. My experiences these last two years have been focused in the recovery of New Orleans, Louisiana.
I don’t think I ever knew what anger was until now.
There have been so many instances where we find ourselves outraged at some new incompetence by the city or federal government, there are so many times when we have to suffer someones poorly informed opinion on the what “they” should do with our city, and there are so many visiting idealists who grow impatient when we don’t want to re-imagine or envision rather, we just want to get our streetlights fixed.
In my computer work in the days of yore, I would find myself upset about some disagreement about which language to use, or hurt by some slight about my abilities. I’d fume and fuss and tell friends about how stupid the other person is.
But, now I see things that are just so awful so frequently, I don’t have time for fuming and fussing.
When I find myself getting very angry — you know what it’s like, your turning over offense in your mind, saying how could they? who do they think they are? — I catch myself and I vocalize along these lines.
Wow. I sure am angry.
And it suddenly turns into something else.
I just melts away.
I relax, my thinking clears up, I drop it and very often I start to laugh.
Then I have a lot of creative energy. It’s just weird.
You know, it’s very hard to think of funny things to say when you’re angry. Which is why the snappy comeback usually only comes to us the moment we step away, because we relax enough to become creative again.
When we do relax, we go straight to humor. Besides anger, humor is a natural response to adversity, anger just gets in the way.
I occurs to me that what has changed is that I’ve come to trust myself in that if I’m angry, then something is wrong.
Before I’d spend justifying my anger, which meant thinking about what made me angry, which would only keep me angry. Now, once I realize I’m angry, that is enough for me. Something is amiss.
Hey, maybe it’s me that’s wrong. Whether or not I’m right or wrong isn’t the issue, it’s that there is a reaction. It is probably not the one that the person intended. I go from feeling angry to saying, okay, what’s up with that? I’ll say something about it, maybe humorous, but sometimes it can be as simple as. You lost me there, I can’t possibly imagine how you could see it that way.
Which is to say, you will learn to use humor in time. You don’t have to become a comedian to apply Pete’s advice. For starters, just do a time out on the situation that makes you angry. So much of humor is simply the straight man saying, “uh, are you sure about that?”
Business Hacks mobile edition says: January 15th, 2008 12:00pm
[...] a story recounted by HP chief architect Pete Johnson, who, while on a conference call, overheard a very public slam against his team of programmers. [...]
Daniel Fath says: January 16th, 2008 5:50pm
Thanks for the interesting post. I have to echo Mr. Gutierrez’ experience — as soon as I identify the emotion I’m feeling, I find myself able to break out of the loop of having to justify the anger, and all the resentent (re-sentiment — i.e. reliving the experience) that comes with it.
I happen to live in Japan, where concepts of personal space are different from those I encountered in the US. Here it’s normal to have someone jabbing their elbow into your side during the daily commute on jam-packed trains. I’ve adjusted to this by getting to the office earlier in the morning to avoid the peak crowds, but nevertheless find myself almost daily confronted with someone invading my space. My initial reaction was to get angry (Why me?!), which was soon followed by self-recrimination (Why not me?! Everyone has to deal with this — why do I think I’m so special?). The result was frustration.
These days I focus on keeping my side of the street clean, but as a big guy (relative to my fellow commuters) I do take up a lot of space myself. If someone’s jabbing me, I usually ask if they have enough room, and that seems to do the trick — either they’ll respond positively and relax a bit, or they’ll move somewhere else to avoid having to talk to me. Ha ha ha — either way the situation is resolved.
Patrick says: January 17th, 2008 4:20pm
Good point about taking the high road, however your response is troublesome because you effectively passed the insult down to your subordinates:
“I think what you meant to say,” I said calmly, “is that nobody from knows how to write any code . . . . except for Pete.”
Joking or not, it seems unfair to refer to your team this way among your peers.
Scott Allen says: January 24th, 2008 8:18am
When we’re communicating online, it’s much easier to “step out of the moment” and cool off before we respond to something like this (even though a lot of people don’t do it). Doing this in real-time is a rare ability.
Interestingly, though, I have found that practicing that in my virtual communication makes me much better able to do so in my face-to-face communication.
Pete Johnson says: January 24th, 2008 10:23am
@ Patrick - I completely see where you are coming from and how you could interpret my reaction as selling out my team, but my intent was to use the words that I did to point out how ridiculously insensitive the remark was and invalidate it entirely. Based on the reaction I got, everyone on the line knew I wasn’t elevating myself above my team but merely making light of the uncomfortable situation.
Still, you bring up a good point in that my comment could have completely backfired and made me look condescending to my own group of folks. A key to that, I think, is in the delivery. It is hard to get my sarcastic tone in this instance across in text, but you can imagine how I tried to make it perfectly clear that I was kidding.
Pete Johnson
HP.com Chief Architect
Personal blog: http://nerdguru.net
Weekly links for Jan 29, 2008 « Freelancebusiness’s Weblog says: January 28th, 2008 10:21pm
[...] Get Mad But Don’t Get Even - Turn an Insult Into a Favor Although it is much easier to get angry when someone insults you, maybe a joke would be a better way to release the tension… [...]
Christy says: February 12th, 2008 2:35pm
“The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you.”
John E. Southard
Nerd Guru » Blog Archive » Press Room says: March 23rd, 2008 8:38am
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Nerd Guru » Blog Archive » Contest Winner: Philip Chen! says: March 23rd, 2008 8:41am
[...] I found out about the contest when I was reading Pete’s insightful article on ‘Get Mad But Don’t Get Even - Turn an Insult Into a Favor.’ Thanks Pete for the wonderful [...]
Running Diary: The Podcast Guest | Nerd Guru says: April 7th, 2008 7:44am
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