Think of all the people we assume misbehave. Toddlers and children misbehave. The very definition of the word teenager is misbehavior. In-laws are big misbehavers. So are old people. They’re downright crotchety. Look at how husbands are portrayed in sitcoms – they’re clueless and misbehavers. And let’s not even go there about bosses. If you’re an employee, your boss is probably an ego –tripping, power mad pain, at least in your opinion. And for business owners, ornery workers are a constant and royal headache.
Come to think of it, do you ever have a day that you don’t have to deal with someone who is snippy, curt or just plain rude- in the grocery store, on a crowded bus, on line at the post office, or in the doctor’s waiting room? It’s gotten to the point where we expect folks to be kinda “off” before we even meet them, and then we react accordingly.
So what does misbehaving really mean? It simply means people who don’t do what we want them to do, or who we think have ill intentions toward us. They got that bad juju. We just know what they are thinking even before we ask. In fact, we hardly ever ask, so comfortable are we in our assumption and subsequent rush to judgment. They’re just wrong, and the only thing left to do is get on the defensive and protect ourselves from their mischief.
But what if people are not misbehaving? What if they’re actually well made all the time, living through the events in their own lives from the very best intentions? I mean, what if it’s really not about us at all?
For the past few years, I’ve been working with a national non-profit, Count Me In. My friend and colleague, Esther, worked for a corporation from whose foundation we were soliciting a major sponsorship. Esther and I knew each other from our previous tenure together on a congressional board when we represented different corporations (our former employers). Now she was in this new company and I was with CMI.
It takes knocking on many doors to find the right point of entry into a major corporation, to get in front of the right people with the authority to grant a request. Several of us at CMI knew different people at various levels of Esther’s company. So we sent our proposal letter to the highest ranking person we knew and copied everyone else. We figured a full court press and a little peer pressure might get us some attention.
It worked, and soon after Esther responded to me with a short email from her blackberry. She’d heard about our letter from one of her company’s executives. But her message was so brief and curt that it sounded as if she was angry. I immediately worried that I’d offended her by going over her head without giving her advance warning. The corporate corridors can be a minefield. I might have placed her in a vulnerable position with her superiors. I may have burned a bridge forever. And now she was misbehaving by giving me the email equivalent of the cold shoulder.
But I’d recently learned the concept of misbehaving vs. well made. So I took a deep breath and sent Esther a letter explaining our motivation for writing to her superiors, and asking if she‘d been hurt by it.
Esther got back to me immediately. She went back through our email exchange to see how I could have interpreted hers as being angry, and she apologized for having been too busy at the time to write a more coherent response. She assured me that she would never stand on corporate ceremony with me, and that she always wanted to know when her behavior seemed otherwise. She went on to explain that she had been distracted by the fact that she had suddenly started losing her vision. On the day of her email to me she was rushing to get to the hospital in a nearby city ahead of a pending snow storm.
She wasn’t angry with me. In fact, her response had nothing to do with me! Had I not trusted that she was well made, I would never have gone back and asked her about it in the first place. I would have assumed she’d copped an attitude and then caught one of my own. Trusting that Esther was well made strengthened our relationship and gave us a committed ally within her company.
