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Captious, nit-picky behavior in a professional context usually signals to me that there is another problem that is worth attending to. e.g. A person raising a s
by blatherard 13y ago
Captious, nit-picky behavior in a professional context usually signals to me that there is another problem that is worth attending to. e.g. A person raising a series of petty objections in a meeting may have deeper problems with the plan that she can't yet articulate, or is being put in a position of apparent but not real authority (that is, "the ship has sailed" on a decision without real agreement being reached).
Telling someone to more or less shut up might pay off in the short term, as in make a particular meeting go faster, but in the long haul you're ignoring a pretty telling symptom.
- Timmmmbob 13y agoNo there really are people that just bring up problems that aren't problems.
- frogpelt 13y agoI think you can tell the captious people from those who aren't by whether they behave that way in every day meaningless conversation. The type of person who responds to everything opinion regardless of how meaningless with "not necessarily" is probably going to have the same problems at work.
- kirse 13y agoAgree. I always use this behavior as a red flag for myself... whenever I look back on my behavior for the day/week and find myself being captious, petty or not, it tends to be a reminder to check my motives and examine if I have unresolved (generally negative) feelings toward the topic / people at hand that needs to be resolved. Sometimes it's just stress leaking out from other areas of life. The smarter one is in a given arena, the more easily we can delude ourselves with smart-sounding rationalizations/objections, especially if we haven't examined our motives.