Seven Strategies for Coping with Difficult Work Situations

Have you ever said to yourself at work, “This doesn’t make sense.”?  One summer while in college I worked at a hardware/homecenter store.  There was a drought and business in the lawn and garden was severely affected.  No one was coming into the store.  I thought that store management must be working on a plan to get customers.   I tried to make sense of it and thought there must be a master plan that I didn’t know about. Ultimately, I realized that management didn’t have a plan and the store went out of business a few years later.

Many jobs later, whenever I am confronted with “This doesn’t make sense”  I accept that there may not be a plan and create my own plan of how to handle things.  Here are the things that you can use to cope with the daily challenges.

Coping Strategies

•  Focus on the things that you can control.  It’s easy to spot the big problems when you are dealing with them every day.  Ask yourself if that problem has any direct impact on what you are trying to accomplish.  For example, you may not like how your company does purchasing.  It may be a long and cumbersome process.  Your part is to complete three forms.  Instead of focusing on all the parts of the purchasing process that doesn’t work efficiently, focus only on your part – completing the three forms.  I found that if I can focus only on what I have direct control that I can start to ignore some of the other parts which I have no control.
• Take notes of the day and time you involve people.  If you complete your three forms, make a note of when you submitted them to the next person for review.  Keep track of how things are moving through the process.  The benefit of taking notes is that you can figure out how long something generally takes.  If it is truly unreasonable, you have data that you can pass onto your supervisor.  Sometimes, when I’ve taken notes, I discovered that it really wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.  We tend to remember the worse case of when something was delayed.  That may only be an exception and the rest of the time, things may go fairly easy.
• Understand that the more people that are involved the longer it will take.  Come up with your own rule of thumb of the time equivalent for each person.  For example, if you need approval from three people figure that each person will take 3 days to do their part.  It may only ten minutes for them to work on it, but it may take 3 days for you to get an answer.  Three people at three days each equals a total of nine days.  You may not like the fact it takes nine days, but if you come up with a rule of thumb for your organization it will help manage your expectations of why things are taking so long.
• Talk to your co-workers about the problem.  Are your co-workers faced with the same challenges?  What have they done to overcome the problem?  I worked for a manager  who I didn’t think liked me.  I couldn’t figure out why he seemed ambivalent about everything that I did.  I confided in a co-worker my concerns about this manager.  My co-worker proclaimed, “He treats everyone that way!”  Suddenly, what I thought was a problem, disappeared.
• Summarize the things that you like or are working well.  It’s easy to focus on the negative things which take more time.  Sometimes those things get too much of our attention.  Shift your focus to the things or people that you enjoy.  If those negative things are getting you down, starting thinking about the positive things.
• Delegate or trade those things that are challenges.  Someone may enjoy doing that task which you dread.  If you have people that report to you, consider delegating it to a person as a career broadening opportunity.  Someone else may enjoy the challenge.  If you don’t have direct reports, is there a colleague who would be interested in trading tasks?
• Inform  your supervisor.  Let your boss know if another person or department is making your daily job too trying.  The key is to inform your supervisor by summarizing the facts of the problem.  Try to keep your emotions or frustration out of the discussion.  Your boss may have a solution or be able to work with the other department.  If several of your colleagues are having the same problem, you need to take action to get it resolved.

Use one or more of these coping strategies for the daily challenges at work.  What other techniques can you use for coping with difficult situations?