My Communication Style

For supporting my family, I have a part-time job at a Chinese restaurant when I have no class. My duty is preparing the buffet before customs come. I work with several co-workers. Everyone takes a part of the duty, so we must cooperate to finish the job well. At the beginning of this job, everything went well, I could make money and practice English, some of staffs became my friends.

But later one unhappy matter happened.

One new employee joined our team. Like before, I welcomed her and helped her to fit this position. But as time passed, I found she didn’t want to take her responsibility. Normally, after two weeks, the new worker could take himself duty like other old employees, no matter about working pace or skills. But it seemed that she didn’t want to take her duty. Three weeks after she began working, she still worked very slow, and let me do a part of her responsibility.

At first, I thought maybe she was not very fast learner and helped her with my warm heart. But later, I found she didn’t make any progress regardless how patient I taught her. That made me very tired for I had to do more than one person’s job. If I didn’t do so, the boss would blame me because I was senior worker to my new co-worker, and our two’s job couldn’t be finished. I am not an extravert, and I am not glib. So I didn’t know how I should notice her. What I could do was only took the duty with anger, on the other hand, showed my anger. But she was still working like that.

I have a one-year-old baby. I have to look after him and do some housework. At same time, I am just taking the PN program. How heavy the burden I am taking! I turned more and more tired, and more and more angry. I became crazy! At last, several days ago, when she worked very lazily again, I became beyond my endurance. I shouted to her, asking her what she wanted to do and if she knew how to work. And then we began to quarrel angrily. As we were very loudly, the boss came and stopped us. He let us stay at home one day and separated our duties.

In these days, I am calming down and I read the article about personal communication style. I tried to identify my own communication style with Wilson Learning Model.

Normally, I am shy girl. I don’t like to show my feeling to others because I don’t know how to do that and what the others will think. In shortly, I keep my emotion to myself. I am almost Task-Responsive. So in Scale A, I think I should choose 1. At same time, I can make decision by myself. I don’t like always to ask others this or that to make my decision. But I am not so much assertive. I make decision not so fast and sometimes want to hear others’ suggestion. I am somewhat Tell-Assertive. So in Scale B, I would like to choose 3. In this case, I can get the conclusion: my predominant communication style is in the Driver grid.

But under some particular condition, such like I feel stress and can’t solve problem in my normal way, I may turn into other communication style. At that time, I will be very loudly showing my uncomfortable and expressing my feeling clearly with anger or anxiety. I will turn into totally Expressive and People-Responsive, so I choose 4 in Scale A. When I can’t find the good way to solve my problem by myself, I am glad to ask others and get more advice. At this time, I will become Ask-Assertive, so I would choose 1 in Scale B. Interestingly, I found my backup communication style is just opposite to my predominant one.

In the conflict I mentioned above, firstly, I only used my predominant communication style. I didn’t tell her my uncomfortable feeling to her working attitude because I didn’t know what she would think about me. I didn’t ask other co-workers how they could do when they encounter such matter. No one other helped me to make decision. What I only did was to keep my dissatisfaction to myself. So I took the stress totally by myself. In that way, I felt worse and worse. Everything I didn’t in my normal communication style was useless. At last, I couldn’t help changing into my backup communication style. I censured her very rudely, showing my anger clearly. The problem may be solved since we have been separated, but I don’t feel comfortable. When I calmed down, I don’t think I want solve the matter in that way.

After I finished reading this article, I thought over it very much. I think I can find a better way to deal with such conflict. Instead of holding all feeling to myself, I will tell her my feeling when I feel uncomfortable, but next time I will do it in more gentle way. And I will be mild to teach her how she should work and point out what wrong is. I know if I can’t express my meaning when it is just little, it will be accumulated to a big trouble finally. Although sometimes maybe I can’t find the way that I can explain clearly, I should ask some of my colleagues for help. Because they may have met such problem before, I will ask them how they would deal with this person. In this way, I can find the better way to solve this communication problem.