Skillful means for dealing with difficult people

After watching the video in class last week about dealing with difficult people in the workplace I felt troubled.  Intellectually, I understand that maintaining equanimity in tense situations is a useful means of avoiding conflict.  Yet, despite being a trained yoga teacher, I still find it very challenging to practice neutrality and compassion when dealing with difficult situations in the workplace.  I also wonder, like many of our classmates vocalized, if conflict has a healthy role to play in workplace dynamics.  From this perspective, equanimity practiced to the extreme may result in avoidance, which as Bolman and Deal point out, is not an effective means of interpersonal relations.

In order to resolve this concern, I looked to Buddhism, which holds non-violence as one of, if not, the sacred truth.  However, Buddhist philosophers have long recognized that practicing non-violence is a formidable and complicated task.  Perhaps in order to guide the struggling practitioner, the Upaya-Kausalya Sutra, written the first century BCE, advised that skillful means can take many forms, even the form of outright violence.  The Sutra tells the story of the Buddha incarnated as a sea captain  transporting 500 merchants across a body of water.  Through clairvoyance the Buddha learns that one among of the merchants intends to kill everyone on the boat and steal their wares.  Faced with this difficult situation, the Buddha decides to kill the man in order to prevent him from becoming a mass murderer, even though the Buddha knows that he himself will suffer a karmic penalty as a result of that act.  Yet, in that situation, it was the most appropriate way to act because it saved the lives of the other men and, more importantly, it saved the would-be murder from committing a heinous crime. 

The Upaya-Kausalya Sutra (translates to "The Skill is in Means Sutra") teaches the student of Buddhism not to take the teachings too literally - the compassionate choice may not always appear so.  Applied to the study of management, these teachings suggest that there is no one "right" way to deal with difficult people; rather, the skillful way to respond to a particular situation is context dependent.  In one situation, skillful means may be to remain neutral; in another, skillful means could involve confrontation or seeking recourse through a mutual supervisor.   However, the skillfulness of any action ultimately resides in the motivation of the actor.  The Buddha did not kill the man to save his own life; he killed the man to stop him from the suffering he was about to inflict on himself and others.  Thus, as Denhardt, Denhardt and Aristigueta advocate, managing effectively implies knowing oneself well and adhering to high ethical standards.  As managers we must continually reflect on the choices we make in dealing with people and situations, asking ourselves why we are choosing to take one action over another.  Through self-reflection we have an opportunity to attain peace of mind while also identifying appropriate, if varied, ways of responding to difficult situations.

On the Upaya-Kausalya Sutra:


http://books.google.com/books?id=-Vu4E1xPJRIC&pg=PA17&dq=Upayakausalya+Sutra&hl=en&ei=ZsOzTOLABIX7lwe08diNCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDoQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=Upayakausalya%20Sutra&f=false

Molly Flanagan
October 11, 2010