Warm, Cold, or No Reading at All?

Over at Ask a Manager, a reader with a vicious coworker ("Cassandra") writes in. Since she's in a small town, it is impossible to avoid the coworker socially, and she is tired of forgoing certain activities simply so she doesn't have to deal with Cassandra.

The situation reminded me a little of one I faced shortly after college, so the answer interested me. Here's the main point:

Image by Artur Solarz, via Unsplash, license.

[T]here are professionally appropriate ways to indicate you don't want to engage socially with someone. You can be chilly to Cassandra as long as you're not rude, and you can excuse yourself from conversations with her right away. I recommend Miss Manners' map of the varying degrees of chilliness to employ with someone you loathe -- which goes from Slightly Cool ("your mouth turns up when you have to say hello to her, but your eyes do not participate in the smile") to Cold ("all the formalities, but no smile -- you do not have a personal grievance against him; you are merely treating him as the sort of person you do not want to know") to Freeze ("you do not greet him, you do not acknowledge his presence, and if he approaches you, you turn away"). Freeze is too much for a coworker; I recommend Slightly Cool. (If you prefer Cold, I'd only caution you to factor in how it will look to those around you, which matters more than what Cassandra thinks.)

Frankly, there's real power in being meticulously professional, and it's more likely to throw her off whatever game she's playing than getting down in the mud with her will do. [bold added]

The power here lies precisely in the fact that Cassandra is functioning in an entirely second-handed way: All the normal ways of being chilly are to communicate moral disapproval for an audience, which includes the recipient.

Here, the recipient's past actions indicate that she does not care about the moral disapproval, beyond its potential to provoke a response she can use to play the victim to others -- potentially preempting or overwhelming whatever message of disapproval one would want to convey to the others.

The power in the "professional" response is that it provides no buttons to push, and it is perfectly appropriate since Cassandra is a coworker. She would be frustrated (if not defeated) by the very boundary she started out violating.

Would that advice have helped a younger "me?" I am not so sure: I was quite socially awkward then, and I had not been exposed to professional norms very much. Perhaps with more of an explanation about those (which can be found by searching the site, or absorbed by following it for a time), it might have sunk in.

This is hardly the first time I have wished Ask a Manager had been around quite some time earlier! I'll happily risk sounding like a broken record and recommend her site to anyone who might be nonplussed by a workplace issue, or simply wants to become more effective on the job.

-- CAV