Bheki Part 2: The Flip Side

Bheki seems to be the perfect employee right?

You will recall that emotional capabilities can be both productive and counterproductive. Let’s look at some of the counterproductive behaviours emanating from Bheki’s personality.

• Driven – aggressive, loss of emotional control when stressed, impatient, irritable

• Assertive – domineering, poor listener, I’m always right mentality,

• Direct – poor interpersonal awareness, tactless, blunt, crass, unaware of how you land on or impact on others

• Intuitive – emotionally sensitive, easily hurt

The right circumstances would also draw these behaviours out of Bheki. No doubt this must have happened at times in his project manager role. However, these behaviours were prominent and counterproductive when it came to how he functioned within the HR Team. Bheki was often frustrated with his perceived lack of results orientation on the part of the HR Team. He also regarded them as being “ too refined”, too political, too sensitive. With the above behaviours being prominent in his profile, Bheki preferred to call a spade – a – spade, or more to the point he called a spade a shovel. He did not care about and was unaware of how he impacted on his colleagues. He couldn’t hide his contempt at “their lack of decisiveness. Because things did not happen quickly enough, he would become very frustrated and this would boil over into rants and temper outbursts.

His very high dominance made him intolerant of opposing views and also resulted in him being a poor listener and dominating discussions much to the frustration of some of his colleagues. Being highly intuitive meant that he was also very sensitive and he would take criticism and disagreements personally. This only made him even more emotionally charged, and being direct and having very little filter, he would aggressively lash out at his colleagues. In a nutshell, Bheki was prone to one of the derailers we highlighted earlier – combativeness. Many of his HR colleagues were afraid of him. He also had ongoing conflict and running battles with some of them which detrimentally affected the morale and functioning of the HR Team. Copious amounts of time and energy went into resolving conflicts (drag, drain and drift) instead of being invested in the HR Team “ getting on with the job”.

In a “high octane” pressurized, challenging and high results orientation environment such as the corporate HQ build, these behaviours were seldom provoked because this role played to Bheki’s strengths and their productive counterparts would be at work. Even when situations occasionally drew out the counterproductive behaviours that would often actually help to move things forward, and because Bheki was not engaged with all the stakeholders on a continual basis as part of a close knit team, as was the case in HR, there was much more space for people’s “emotions to recover” and for everyone to regain their equilibrium and move on.