FATAL ATTRACTION: SWIMMING WITH THE SHARKS
Describing Difficult Personalities
All of us have a personality style, that is, ways of thinking, feeling and expressing ourselves. It is healthy to be able to understand how we are different from others and how they might be different from us. That way, we can be objective about how our behavior impacts others and how we can adjust the way we act around others accordingly.
Some of us have personalities that vary significantly from the norm that involve patterns of behavior that cause distress to those around us as well as to ourselves. Diagnosable personality disorders comprise roughly 15-19% of the general population. The rest of us are somewhere between “pretty healthy” to “pretty unhealthy”. If you hire from the general population, you can expect a portion of your workforce to fall into the disordered category. Here are some indications of a disordered/difficult personality:
• Always late to work
• Constant chaos in personal and work life
• Tends to make excuses and bend the truth
• Difficulty owning any mistake or misunderstanding
• Displays general unhappiness and wants others to “fix it”
• Frequent physical complaints to call attention to self
• “Drama Mama” exaggerates things (makes situation worse or better than it really is) and likes to create drama where none exists
• Has an air on entitlement
• Manipulative of others and situations
The way this impacts you and the company is that there will always be a forest fire to put out, consuming much of your time and energy unnecessarily.
SPEAKER: Marti Cobb
Marti has been both a mediator and licensed Marriage and Family Therapist for the past 33 years. As a mediator, she is particularly skilled in areas of custody and shared parenting disputes and cases involving parties with difficult personalities. Marti has served on the Boards of Directors of the Family Mediation Association of Georgia, Cobb Mediators Association and is a current member as well as a past president of Georgia Mediators Association. She also has been appointed, by the Supreme Court, to the Commission of the Georgia Office of Dispute Resolution, just finishing a six year term where she served on the Ethics, Budget and Personnel and Liaison Committees of that organization. She is a practitioner member of the Academy of Professional Family Mediators.
Over the years, she has presented seminars and workshops both locally and for national organizations. Teaching organizations how to work with difficult people is of particular interest to her. Her company is Above And Beyond Conflict. They provide workshops and in-house assessment, training and conflict resolution for agencies and companies.
Date: Thursday, October 23rd, 2014
Time: 11:45AM-1:15PM
Location: The 1818 Club
Cost: Free for Human Resource Management Association members; $35 for Gwinnett Chamber non-HRMA members. All no-shows will be billed. Walk-ins are not guaranteed a seat.
Contact Rachel Jeffers at 770-232-3000 or hrma@gwinnettchamber.org.