“I hope you get cancer and die,” said a customer to staff in a convenience store. They’d just been told an item was out of stock.

This is one of the stories reported by the British Retail Consortium as part of its latest crime survey, setting out a picture of a rising tide of violence and abuse towards shop workers: more than 1,300 incidents every day.

An inability to deal with difficult emotions

Anger, impatience and frustration — and an inability to deal with difficult emotions — have become real problems for modern societies. Research published by Harvard Business Review by Professor Christine Porath found that 76% of public-facing employees internationally experienced “incivility” at least once a month (and 78% said bad behaviours among customers were more common). And it’s not only something seen among people working in frontline jobs in shops or healthcare, but a common feature of online conversations and in workplaces more generally.

There are thought to be a combination of reasons. Rising levels of stress. Higher expectations as customers rather than citizens. The pressures and noise of social media and how the use of technology has changed relationships and affected social skills. A weakened sense of community. A lack of trust in or respect for authority.

An overarching problem is how people deal with those feelings. There’s a lack of self-awareness. People don’t necessarily see they’re being rude or have empathy for how their behaviour might effect others. What’s seen as rude and disrespectful by one person can sometimes be seen as a reasonable form of expression on the other, as just being assertive. Sticking up for yourself.

A snowball effect

In a workplace, rudeness or incivility can become part of a vicious circle, an insidious influence in the culture. When those kinds of behaviours become accepted, even at a minor level, as little niggles, then employee’s lives and sense of wellbeing can be seriously affected. More stress, increased feelings of being isolated, leading to less engagement and motivation, lower productivity and alienation. People stop talking to each other, there’s poor communication, less collaboration.

Self-awareness among employees is a critical skill, in dealing with colleagues and customers alike. Nobody is perfectly self-aware — and everybody is self-aware to some degree, depending on personality and circumstances. It’s a scale that ebbs and flows, and there are skills that can be encouraged and developed to make sure there’s self-awareness when it matters most.

A large part of any situation is you, and you need to have self awareness to be aware of the situation. When you pay attention to what is happening within you, you become more aware of your own thoughts, emotions and feelings. Self-awareness provides you with choices. Self-management — managing your thoughts, emotions and feelings to enhance your performance and optimise interpersonal communication — is the capacity to make the right choices for the situation.

It can enhance connection with other people, minimise stress and improve feelings of control and wellbeing. Having more choices about how you respond enables you to stay connected rather than disconnect, respond rather than react and empathise rather than judge (as well as accept the fact that it’s just human nature that sometimes you will disconnect, react and judge).

The importance of self-management

In other words, all external relationships begin with the relationship you have with yourself so this relationship also needs to be a dynamic one, an active, in-motion relationship.

Some simple ways to think about and improve self-awareness include:

• Getting into the habit of thinking about the ‘what’ rather than the ‘why’. Asking why mostly leads to a negative cycle: I’m bad-tempered, I’m not good with people, I’m not good at my job. What’s far more valuable is thinking about what happened, what the effect on others was, and what you could have done differently. In other words, learning from experience and moving forward;
• Encourage opinions and feedback from managers and colleagues around you, as a way of building more external self-awareness; having more opportunities to understand your reactions to feedback of different kinds; and to become more resilient;
• Make use of ‘pull feedback’. Most feedback in organisations is push, 1-1’s, appraisals etc and can often be resisted or dreaded. 360 feedback is theoretically pull but not really. More valuable is pull feedback, feedback that the receiver seeks out and asks for;
• Regularly taking a moment to test your self-awareness, your ability to be honest and to deal with negatives in a constructive, healthy way — just by asking questions of yourself about what’s happening at work, in your relationships with people, and what this tells you about what’s working and what might need to change.

Photo by Yan Krukau