Are You the Hero or Villain? How to Rewrite Your Office Story.

In this excerpt from my book “Solving Your Career Mystery,” we explore how to identify strengths and weaknesses – either yours, a colleague’s, or both – and use those insights to work more effectively together.

When you see a movie, there is usually a hero and a villain. The arc of the story shows the hero overcoming obstacles, fighting the odds and the villain, and eventually winning the day. The movie wraps up with the villain being defeated, and all is right with the world.

I have encountered many employee conversations over the years that follow the same hero and villain narrative in the workplace. Of course, the people engaged in these conversations are always the heroes, and the villains are people in the company who are causing all of the trouble. In these stories, the desired outcome is to have the villains, and their challenging actions, stopped so the hero employee can succeed.

But what if the hero telling the story is someone else’s villain in the company?

Or what if both parties are both heroes and villains? That seems implausible given the movie narrative. Clearly someone has to be the “good guy” and someone else the “bad guy,” right?

Not so fast…

The reality is there are strengths and weaknesses for each that show up in daily routines and behavior. There are also behaviors on display in times of calm moments that vary distinctly from behaviors shown during times of high stress. More importantly, while there are behaviors that employees know and recognize about themselves in a corporate environment, there are likely other behaviors that colleagues see but the employee may not see themselves. With these complexities in mind, it is easy to understand how the hero and villain can show up within the same person.

The chapter in the book is all about exploring who you are and the behaviors you bring into the workplace. Combined with your passions and skills, it is critical to recognize how you positively (and negatively) impact your colleagues and your overall work environment. Your behavior at work can help shape your success — and impede it. More importantly, not recognizing your behaviors and their impact can hold you back. Below is a story that ties this together.

How your behavior impacts your performance

I consider myself fortunate to have learned about the impact of behaviors in the workplace early in my career and never have forgotten those lessons. In my first job out of graduate school, I was part of an account team that worked with large companies to help them understand how the profile data of their customers could help their marketing teams with research insights and future product enhancement ideas.

A core part of the job was flying to client headquarters locations and presenting gleaned insights from the client’s current customer base. The detailed data that acted as the foundation for these presentations was often 150+ pages in length, and in the form of data tables. Our company’s account team members focused on creating the story about the needs of the customer from detailed data. Behind the scenes, the executive summary presentations and recommendations stemming from the data had to be created, reviewed, printed, and practiced with talking points before traveling to the client.

One colleague and I had to travel together approximately every 90 days to visit one of the two key clients where we shared responsibility. She and I meshed well from a personal perspective, and I had great respect for her experience and knowledge of working with large corporate marketing teams. However, each quarter when another client trip approached, my anxiety levels started to kick in. I felt like she was the villain in the story, constantly checking up on me and pushing me to finish my tasks with the trip sooner than I was ready and never satisfied with the results. If anything was slightly off with the data or the presentation content, her automatic inclination was to cancel the trip or delay it for another several weeks.

Once we arrived at the client location, my colleague was incredibly organized and calm as long as the meeting proceeded as planned. She became flustered, however, when the client changed the topics, order of content, the timeframe for discussion, etc. — all of which were common occurrences at big corporations where agile teams quickly shifted priorities. In these situations, I would try to jump in to help out but had difficulties taking over the meeting dynamics while my colleague was trying to adjust to client needs. Ultimately, my stress levels did not subside until after the business meetings were complete and we were safely on the plane back home.

Fortunately, several months into this travel stress pattern, our larger account team spent a full day together discussing how to best operate as a holistic group and as traveling teams. Part of that session’s content centered around reviewing Myers Briggs work style profiles for all team members. I was not initially surprised to learn that this colleague and I were almost polar opposites in our Myers Briggs profiles. However, the detailed team conversation about how to work with other team members when reflecting on each other’s work styles opened up an entirely new world for me.

The behavioral profile results taught me two key lessons

1. First, my colleague had a propensity for perfection. I knew that inherently, but the assessment results really drove it home. What we realized as a traveling team is that if I worked with her on a schedule in advance for specific deliverables associated with the trip, she could let go of always checking in with me on my progress. We both were adapting our natural behaviors or styles a bit to accommodate the other person’s needs.
2. Second, I learned that I could add significant value by stepping up during client meetings when the reality of our presentations did not match the originally scheduled plan. If the client said, “We only have 10 minutes, so let’s just skip to the key findings and budget needs,” I could jump in and start handling that part of the conversation to give my colleague a chance to catch her breath and have more time to shift gears mentally for that change in direction.

After the team building day and a few other follow-up discussions, my stress-inducing travel colleague and I ended up becoming a dynamic duo for future trips. We were leveraging each other’s strengths (and shortcomings) and presented the best possible front for clients. Ironically, I had another colleague who matched my Myers Briggs profile and who meshed perfectly with me personally and professionally. We realized though that we were not always the best travel companions when it came to client results, because our strengths — and our gaps — were exactly the same.