How Controllers Behave


Controllers assert themselves , sometimes very intensely. Both consciously and unconsciously they bear down on the world around them to satisfy their wants.

One of my clients , Rick, sought help for both the self-imposed stress caused by his tendency and the complaints he received from coworkers. Rick is a senior executive in a telecommunications company. People around him were complaining that he was ˜˜pushy and ˜˜ intense . He believed that rumors were spreading about how tough he was to work for, and he was afraid that his career might be hurt by these rumors.

For the life of him, Rick couldnt see what the fuss was all about. He was certain that his controlling style got him to his current position. He did recall, though, that a senior HR leader had told him recently that the higher up he went in the organization, the more he would have to contain himself and develop a more graceful communication style. Maybe there was some wisdom to that advice.

Rick has piercing eye contact. He is highly intelligent . He wastes no words on niceties, clearly preferring to stay focused on the task at hand. When you speak to him or, more precisely, when he speaks to you, there is no feeling of empathy coming back at you. There is just mission and strategy.

In order to determine the extent of his problem, I asked him whether it was okay for me to talk with some of his direct reports . Rick had no problem with the request. After all, that would be a direct route to the challenge at hand. The staff I interviewed consistently claimed that Rick was the quintessential controller. Two people alluded to what had become company lore: that when Rick becomes frustrated because he is not getting what he wants, he ˜˜ snorts and puffs like an angry , wild animal. There was no doubt in my mind that Ricks career was at risk of being harmed by his image.

Knowing that there was no disagreement between Rick and me about his being a very dominant, controlling personality, I asked him the obvious question: ˜˜Why do you behave this way?

Without missing a beat, Rick replied, ˜˜Its who I am. I tend to be faster and smarter than those around me. I see nuance. I know what needs to be done. I know where Im taking things. If people just did it my wayand I know that sounds arrogant we would save a lot of time and achieve more of our goals. Its who I am.

I accepted that. The next question was, ˜˜Is it working for you? ˜˜Well, not right now.

˜˜Why? ˜˜Our CEO has indicated that the feedback he is getting from my peers and apparently from human resources is that I am too aggressive for my own good. I have expressed interest in the role of chief operating officer of the parent company, and this issue could hold me back. I want to address it in order to remove the obstacle .

˜˜If your style is not serving you favorably, why do you persist in exhibiting it? I asked.

Rick gave the typical answer offered by controllers. ˜˜I dont know how to control it, he said. ˜˜On a good day, Im fine. But when things arent right, okay, it just comes from inside. I cant help it.

˜˜How do you feel when it just starts coming out? ˜˜Angry, he replied. ˜˜I get intense. When somebody doesnt get it, okay, I can feel my blood pressure rise.

The ˜˜okays he kept inserting into his sentences were part of his communication style. Intense controllers sometimes use such tools to control the thoughts of the other person. Its as if theyre saying, ˜˜First I want you to think this particular thought. Okay, now that you have had that thought, I want you to have this thought. Dont have other thoughts! Just think what I tell you to think.

So anger was one topic Rick and I addressed. We had to explore why not getting what he wanted made him so angry. Through multiple sessions we traced it to pain he had experienced in his childhood. He wanted more of his fathers attention than he was getting. This pain was never really processed . It was unresolved . Rick learned both to avoid the pain and to satisfy his needs. His tool was to impress his father. He learned to be a take-charge man, just like his father was. But all along Rick has feared this pain. When his efforts to eradicate and avoid the pain looked like they were going to fail, he would get angry.

Notice that his fear was not expressed as worry. This was not his particular response to the possibility of revisiting his pain. Instead, Rick learned over his lifetime to leverage his strong will in response to his fear. He became controlling. To reduce his controlling orientation, he had to confront his fear and process his unresolved pain.

Ricks deputies described him as a poor delegator. They explained that he only partly communicated what must be done and then would get involved when people werent doing what he wanted. This, too, is a common problem for people with controlling personalities. Sometimes they undercommunicate in order to justify getting back involved. Sometimes they are simply poor communicators who assign projects ineffectively. Sometimes they unfairly judge people as incapable and think ˜˜this person is going to screw up anyway so Ill just get them started and step in a little later. Often they simply underestimate the amount of control they want to have over how something gets done. This was the case with Rick. He just wanted complete control over everything.

Its not that Rick was a perfectionist; he wanted things done his way, but it was easy for him to allow his staff to make mistakes and ignore correcting them. He just tended to control. If perfectionism had been another trait on top of his controlling orientation, he would have been even tougher to work for. People might feel that on top of working for someone who did not empower them, they were running around after trivialities.

Suzanne is a good example of a controlling perfectionist. A vice president of marketing for a midsize furniture-manufacturing company, she drove people in her office crazy by catching them on the smallest wayward detail and landing on them for it. Unlike Rick, who tended to control areas linked to his various short-term and long- term goals, Suzanne controlled whatever affected her image.

For Suzanne, gaining the esteem of others at all costs called for a perfectionistic approach to everything she touched. She cared very much about how she was perceived by others. It showed up in how she maintained her house (expensively designed and furnished, always tidy), her car (expensive, always clean, inside and out), her clothes (always current and very expensive), her hair and her makeup , her office, her stationery, her choice of assistant (˜˜a masters degree in romantic literature, dont you know), her on-the-job style. When Suzanne had the slightest opportunity to impress, she took it.

I first met Suzanne while I was attending a board meeting to observe someone else I was coaching. Before the meeting began , I overheard her chatting with a new colleague. In less than five sentences, she managed to communicate that her daughter was a national gymnastics contestant but didnt make the top three; this same daughter was going to the most prestigious medical school in the country but it had been a real struggle to get in; her husband was negotiating for a private jet (wow, are they ever expensive); her son may have graduated first in his class in his freshman year of engineering, but ˜˜gosh, did he have to work hard. Its not fair how they make them work.

Suzanne was reasonably skilled at looking humble while carefully demonstrating that she was special. Image was her driving force. She was controlling because she had to sustain that image. I remember thinking how challenging she would be to coach. I got my chance to find out: A month later she called for help.

Coaching Suzanne about her controlling and perfectionistic orientation was indeed quite difficult. Like Rick, she had to wrestle with fear. All children periodically experience a craving for more love, security, and attention than they are getting at the time. When it occurs frequently enough and severely enough, however, they will build a defense of some kind to prevent recurrence . A fear drives the creation and maintenance of that defense system.

However, that fear manifested itself differently in Suzannes case than in Ricks. Ricks response to deep pain and insecurity was to do what his father did and liked to see in his boy: Take charge, keep control. His style in doing so was characterized as pushy, intense, task oriented, and sometimes angry. Suzannes response to deep insecurity was to fill in its corollary emptiness with the respect and affection of others by being perfect and behaving perfectly . Achieving perfection for Suzanne could only be fully achieved through complete control.

Rick and Suzanne had two different styles of response to the core fears that settled in as they experienced life, but their responses led them both to develop problematic controlling personalities. Other controllers develop differently. For example, some prideful people cannot relinquish control of their position in an argument even in the face of obvious contrary evidence. They come across as controlling because they just wont let up. The aversion to being wrong locks them up. Their obstinacy is their control. If they lose their control, they think they are worthless.

Many controllers are tricky. They use a variety of techniques to control others. They dont come across as controllers, initially, but their techniques are effective, just the same. Some examples:

  • I remember a client who only made love with her husband when she wanted something important from him. And he never knew the difference.

  • Another client avoided all significant effort and, controlling every detail from afar, delegated to her assistant and her husband everything she wanted done. It wasnt that she was lazy. Her fear was that if she had to do the work herself, she would soon be found out to be a failure.

  • Another client used guilt as his primary tool to control the people close to him. He positioned himself as a victim and found subtle ways to make it clear that if people loved him, they would help him outin ways he would happily describe for them. He was fearful that if he couldnt get people to serve him, then he would be of no significance in the world.

  • Still another client always positioned himself as knowing more than everyone else. He controlled peoples views of him by what he didnt say specifically but only alluded to. He was afraid he would not be successful unless he had the respect of others.

There are also many controllers who dont get into trouble over it. As a matter of fact, most of us are controllers to some extent, depending on the people we are dealing with and the circumstances involved. People influence others consciously and unconsciously all the time. Many long-term marriages go through stages of struggling for control and relinquishing control. There is also a natural control dynamic in most employee-employer relationships. The primary reason to address control is when it is a cause of problems.




Face It. Recognizing and Conquering The Hidden Fear That Drives All Conflict At Work
Face It. Recognizing and Conquering The Hidden Fear That Drives All Conflict At Work
ISBN: 814408354
EAN: N/A
Year: 2002
Pages: 134

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