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Leading Your Crystal

tion of the new cultural patterns you’ve been trying to demonstrate.
Adopting the victim role refl ects poorly on the utility of the behaviors
you’ve been attempting to display, and the loss of your credibility
takes with it some of the impact of many weeks, months, or years of
role-modeling.
It’s not necessary that you lose or that someone else wins. The
defi nitions of success are far more fl exible, and they are constantly
made and adjusted by both parties. Don’t get entrenched! You can
reframe an incoming “attack”—perhaps, for example, a seemingly
aggressive complaint from an outspoken customer—as an expres-
sion of information. You can respond to that information without
framing it as a win-or-lose scenario: “One of our goals is to sup-
port our top-tier customers with 100 percent response to issues and
improvement requests,” you might tell your team. “We’re learning,
however, that one such customer is particularly rapid and variable in
the pace and content of those requests, probably because of its par-
ticular business constraints. How can we refi ne our purpose or real-
locate our resources to maximize our ability to meet that customer’s
needs, while still keeping it in balance with our other work?” Such
a conversation held internally may be a good fi rst step; including the
diffi cult customer in a similar conversation might be the second.

Avoid the Three Roles at All Costs
Once you become aware of the three undesirable roles, you’ll begin
to see them everywhere in the workplace. Table 9.1 lists some of their
more common manifestations. When directed at you, these manifes-
tations strongly encourage you to fall back into pre-scripted roles.
Learning to recognize them and treat them as red-fl ag warnings to
monitor your own response is well worth your time.
Of course, your best response is heavily situation dependent, and
the examples of exit tactics offered in this chapter are necessarily
somewhat simplistic. They won’t work in every situation, and they
may not work for you. But they do illustrate ways of disallowing
the activation of role-based scripts by turning the conversational

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