The sandpit bully

By Fiona Boyd |

After writing yesterday’s post on playing nice in the sandpit, and making sure that when you’re in business, you try choose colleagues and associates who you have confidence are going to play nice when the chips are down, all isn’t as it should be, or there are some conflicts of interest or conflicts over resources. If you and the other party, continue to play business nice when things aren’t smoothe then chances are you’re going to have a long business relationship and plenty of mutual successes (and probably some dips too – but you’ll all live to tell the tale) along the way.

One of the biggest frustrations I experienced in my time tethered to the corporate world was the fact that you don’t get to choose who you work with. One of the big expectations in organizations and companies is that we all need to do double, triple bendbacks to adjust ourselves to all the different personalities we have to deal with in the modern workplace. As someone who is focused around outcomes and who avoids personality politics as if they were the plague, I find this expectation really unworkable. For me, there are some people I wouldn’t trust with a barge pole between the two of us, and one of the starting points of any meaningful project or business challenge is that all those involved in it, have a level of trust in what the other parties are doing (and in themselves also).

To highlight this notion of trust I’d like to tell you about an interesting experience David and I had a short while after we had sold Arts Hub, and when we were casting around trying to figure out what we would do next. In the year before we’d had some discussions with a marketing guru and some of his pals around a special project at a huge global computer chip maker. The big chip maker was seeking small developers to hand over technology applications that it could use in a new platform it was developing and hoping to lever over to Microsoft. Anyway, the more we got into this the more we realized it was all about taking time, energy and intellectual property off the innovative, creative small guys and transferring this value to a big player with an entrenched position in the market. Once we figured this out, of course, we stopped paying attention to these people and got on with the business of finding an investor or buyer for Arts Hub, which was our mission at the time.

But once we achieved the Arts Hub sale a couple of these characters made contact and rather presumptuously called us in for a chinwag on some new project they were wanting to get off the ground using online social networking (we were in the process of developing our own social network at the time www.collectzing.com). There was plenty of assumption that we would want to get on board (without checking in with us that we wanted to do so), that we would want to create the technology and that we would want to go sell ourselves shamelessly to the Big Four banks and that oh, it would be difficult, but hey what a great mission! The problem with all this was that at no point had David and I indicated any interest in what they wanted to do or any desire to work with them. And when we did a bit of digging into each of the individual characters we found the sort of information that made us realize we simply didn’t trust these people. But in all honesty we kind of knew we didn’t trust them before we even did any digging. At the end of this chinwag meeting David and I had decided we had no interest in this project or these people. Why? Because we didn’t trust them and our instincts said that if things didn’t go as everyone planned then we risked having an unpleasant encounter with a sandpit bully.

The sandpit bully makes you quake in your boots and takes the fun out of the business sandpit.

Since many of our Into the Mountain readers are business owners I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the characteristics of the sandpit bully.

Sandpit bully behavioural characteristics:

No regard for you, your needs or your wishes
Presumptuous behaviour about what you’ll do for them (without checking that you agree)
Presumptuous behaviour combined with extreme projected anxiety that you won’t do as they wish (anger/intimidation/veiled threats, passive aggressive behaviour).
Bored, disrespectful, disregarding behaviour towards you (often masking a sense that you’ve had it easy and somehow ‘owe’ then a legup)
An inability to hear a ‘no’ gracefully
An inability to understand that they might need to offer something of value in exchange for your time/attention/contribution.
Over-intense behaviour around small issues (shows low threshold of irritation, not good in relationships of any kind)
Disregarding or diluting the value of your previous successes and not giving due credit to your ‘runs on the board’. Usually the corollary to this is they regard too highly their successes, or count their ‘getting over the lines’ as grandiose successes that the world has not yet recognized.
Blatant name-dropping and assumption that you know of these ‘names’ and find them credible.
Forcing everybody to do things immediately – not allowing time for others to reach their own conclusions.
Asserts authority over you, together with an expectation that you are expected to submit without question.

I guess I could go on, but in most business and corporate situations where I’ve either witnessed or had to deal with a sandpit bully – one or more of these behaviours has been at play.

I don’t believe it’s possible or even desirable to want to be able to get along with every type of person – clearly we’re all individuals, some of us are more skilled at what we do than others, but shouldn’t our work and endeavours be the evidence of our value? I’ve always found that those who shout their value from the rooftops seem to have the least amount to offer when you scrutinize them closely. They work on the theory that if they tell those around them that something is true for long enough – we will all just default to believing that it indeed is true.

Sandpit bullies are not fun and they take the joy and exuberance out of business. If you see any of the behavioural descriptions above describing what you do, then maybe it’s time to ask yourself some clear questions about what exactly you think the other party is in this picture. By not viewing the other party or parties as intelligent, self-determining individuals who will make up their minds for themselves and are there to be collaborated with not dictated to – is probably stopping you from having some pretty valuable business relationships. After all, it’s not just paying the bills that makes one want to do business with you – it’s also paying them on time, acknowledging and respecting great work and contributions, paying attention to the fact that your associates or suppliers have done work for you and they could be doing the same work for someone else. And that ultimately, no-one owes you anything – all bits of life and business are arrived at by mutual agreement and if they’re not you’re wasting time, energy and money trying to force them to happen.

If you’re someone who is regularly faced with a sandpit bully, then I have a post for you next week. We’ll take a look at some of the desired behaviours required to play happily in the business sandpit – and some of the things you can do if you get tangled with those demonstrating undesired behaviours.

Life’s short. Business is about playing, learning, sharing and growing and creating great economic models. It’s time to grow up and play nice in the sandpit so that we can all make the most of these short lives that we live.

If you’ve got a sandpit bully story to share, please leave a comment. We ask that you play nice and not mention personal or company names – but describe the detail of what happened and what effect it had on you and what you might have learned from the incident.