Navigating high-conflict personalities
The challenge and benefit of the BIFF response: brief, informative, friendly, and firm.
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
—Abraham Maslow, from The Psychology of Science
We’ve all encountered people who favor conflict over calm, blame over benefit-of-the-doubt, and black-and-white thinking over shades of gray. Author/attorney/mediator Bill Eddy describes these individuals as “high-conflict personalities.” Engaging with them can flummox your day, week, or entire work-life in the arts.
In his magically useful book, BIFF, Eddy offers a path to diffuse the attacks or at least to avoid the vortex of high-conflict personalities (aka, HCPs). As he describes the behaviors:
When problems and conflicts arise, instead of looking for solutions, HCPs look for someone to blame. They have an all-or-nothing approach. They think that it must be all your fault or else it might appear to be all their fault – and they can’t cope with that possibility…. They become preoccupied with blaming others in order to escape being blamed themselves. But you can’t point this out to them, because they become even more defensive.
When you receive an email, text, letter, call, or comment that’s packed with blame and high emotion, Eddy suggests your response (if you choose to respond at all) should be BIFF:
Brief - “very short: one paragraph of 2-5 sentences in most cases.”
Informative - “Give a sentence or two of straight, useful information on the subject being discussed.”
Friendly - “This is often the hardest part, but very important.” Maintain a calm and kind tone in the response, even if you’re tempted to fire back with matching emotion.
Firm - “The goal of many BIFF responses is to end the conversation – to disengage from a potentially high-conflict situation. You want to let the other person know that this is really all you are going to say on the subject.”
Of course, in arts organizations, the HCP may hold a position of power that complicates your options: a major donor yelling at front-line staff, a board member finger-wagging at a CEO, a boss berating a direct report. In those cases, leaders and peers must make extra effort to empower and support their teams.
One great example is Fractured Atlas (full disclosure, I’m on the board), which created a “Negative Customer Service Interaction Matrix” for their constituent support team, offering ways to engage or exit an HCP moment. When faced with offensive or aggressive communication, any team member can confront, question, warn, transfer, or even hang up – all with their managers' explicit and prior support.
There’s a longstanding convention in the service industries that the customer (donor, board member, boss, co-worker, constituent) is always right. That’s clearly wrong. So, while we all should strive to serve the world with respect, care, and kindness, we should also be prepared when the world doesn’t offer that back.
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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Hosting & Guesting
Hosting involves inviting, greeting, and supporting those who enter your circle; Guesting includes acknowledging, honoring, and listening in the circles where you are a guest.
Framework of the Week: Ladder of Control
The Ladder of Control is a communications tool for supervisors and their direct reports to help calibrate their reporting relationship across different kinds of work. The ladder offers seven levels of authority, from the least agency (“Tell me what to do…”) to the most agency (“I’ve been doing…”).
PHOTO by Marcus Woodbridge on Unsplash
Sources
Berman, Nina. “Supporting Front-Facing Arts Workers in the Reopening.” Fractured Atlas - Inciter Art (blog), July 27, 2021.
Eddy, Bill. BIFF: Quick Responses to High-Conflict People, Their Personal Attacks, Hostile Email and Social Media Meltdowns. Second edition. Unhooked Books, 2014.