Spam, Spam, Spam, Dr. Nikki & Spam!

Presentation Facelift

Email Safety: Avoiding Emotional Injury in the Workplace

While working to provide Libraries' staff with training and documentation, I realized that some of the materials we made available may be of use to a much broader audience.  So many of us throughout the University support email, Web browsers, Microsoft Office, and more.  So many of our internal customers are asking the same questions.  So many of us are creating the same resources over and over.  In effect Penn State is paying us to do the same job many, many times over.

I began by sharing this work in our Libraries public Website, but this did not allow departments within the University to comment or edit.   When it was decided that staff training would be moved to our Intranet, I still wanted a mechanism for sharing what belonged to the Penn State community while giving our Libraries staff one-stop training, so I created some cross-linking between the PennState Wikispaces Technology Training wiki and the training Intranet site.

This was not my first attempt at sharing on PennState Wikispaces.  In the past, I'd create a draft of an item and make it public to invite others to comment or edit.  This time, I really wanted to start a grassroots movement among the other training professionals I knew to contribute to a pool of knowledge. We could use tagging and macros to aggregate training across several wikis.  I've been working with some of my contacts in ITS Training Services for advice on how to test this idea.

I used my wiki was a proof of concept.  I used social media to promote it.  The feedback I've gotten from other departments has been great.  I've had many people contact me about the idea, thank me for making this training available, ask for advice on how to carry this project forward in their own units, and more.

But it's not just what we get.  If they contribute, we can receive as well.  Libraries can benefit from their contributions.  Penn State benefits by becoming more efficient.  Our faculty and staff get one-stop shopping for training and documentation.

I know that Wikispaces is technically still in test.  I could have waited for a formal policy or a formal group or process to propose this project.  While we wait for the right people to decide that Wikispaces is officially blessed for this use, we are wasting time.  The time it takes for decisions by committee and for processes to be implemented versus the speed of technology today.  The time that is used by training professionals who want to collaborate and work efficiently.

We are wasting time.  Time is money.  No matter where we are in the hierarchy, I think it's our place to take the intiative to save Penn State money.

1. Making gingerbread men with my department as a team-building activity allowed some very busy people to socialize with one another without having to clash over the projects that we make personal.
2. The tea party is a themed training event for University Libraries In-Service Day as a follow-up to last year's migration to Oracle Calendar.  When I need to reach people who need more training on a topic, I try not to repeat the training that was already offered to them.  I also find that making voluntary training fun motivates people to attend and learn.
3. The Zombo tweets, while cheering up a group of moping friends on the last Friday before a holiday, revealed a lot about what people wanted out of social networking applications and what they thought others would want to buy-in.
   
4. My back-channel group is one of the most valuable networks to me.  The playful environment and diversity of the group is important.  By knowing these people first in a social context, I am more likely to take risks and pitch ideas to them.

Today, I play the role of .eduGuru guest blogger.  Check out my guest post.  While you're there, read the other guest posts and the regular bloggers as well.  All good stuff!

In the beginning, I tried to justify it.  In describing an abstract concept or complicated process, it's beneficial to provide a simpler image for comparison.  I taught for five years in the classroom, so I know that relating new learning to one's existing knowledge is good practice.  Conversely, from my experiences in IT and academia, I know that if we overload an unsuspecting audience with too much jargon, learning might not occur.

Yes, I justified myself as a medicinal metaphor user, someone using metaphor to help me present my topics.  I compared extracting a ZIP file with several nested ZIPs to performing a Caesarian section. I compared client-side XSLT and different browsers to how my two children assemble puzzle pieces.  I compared lack of needs assessment to contraception and delivery of training to Paper, Scissors, Rock.

Dressed as "Dr. Nikki", I compared reviewing your scheduled backup to having a checkup and compared email etiquette to personal safety.  With three partners in crime (and in the unfortunate position of sharing the same session time as Jared Spool), I compared Web best practices to a fashion show.  (My part was "Less is More: How to Strip Down Your Content".)

I keep telling myself, I can quit anytime, but I know that's not true.  I'm in the planning stages of many projects like "Instant Trainer--Just Add Water!" with Katharine Strenko, "Oracle Calendar Etiquette: A Tea Party" with Shannon Malkowski, and "Self-Help: The Stuart Smalley Approach to Troubleshooting" (another "Dr. Nikki" presentation).

And that's not bad enough.  Using metaphor means that with each one you use, you need to make a more striking comparison to get the same effect next time.  You need to keep reinventing yourself, coming up with new highs (or lows).  If "stripping down content" in front of the Penn State Web Conference gets us an audience, what do we do next time that is just as good, yet original?  Ask the audience to strip?  (I'm not kidding, metaphorically speaking.  More on this in upcoming posts.)

Metaphor is a gateway literary device.  It leads to apostrophe, allusion, alliteration, and who-knows-what next? Iambic pentameter?  Personification?  Haiku?

But the real threat of metaphor is when we rely on it as a coping mechanism to negotiate organizational politics.  It's like the Star Trek episodes that tried to make a political statement to people who may not have been as receptive to an open conversation about controversial topics.  We dress our real feeling, motives, and intents in metaphor because we expect our audience will not be open to a direct discussion.

We may know the truths at work and want to reveal them, but use metaphor or subtlety to try be as honest as safely possible.  We may also have our own personal motives, so hidden in "for the good of the organization" rhetoric that we don't even realize the truth ourselves.

I've been reading Beyond Bullsh*t: Straight-Talk at Work by Samuel A. Culbert, which talks about the rhetoric we use to advance personal agendas or to dance around someone else's.  When is speaking directly actually possible?  When is it not?

It's made me think about my use of language.  When am I facilitating understanding?  When am I impeding?  When am I enabling all of us (including myself) to hide personal agendas?  When am I just going for the cheap-attention-grabbing blogger version of a clipshow, disguised as a new post?

My second post of reflection from HighEdWeb 2008 is a reaction to a presentation and a personal discussion that help bolster my own personal cause, and--just in case I haven't made it clear enough in previous posts--a clear statement the following opinion:

We should be using wikis for internal documentation and training unless there is a good reason not to do so.

Rather than frame my arguments in why to use wikis, let's take a look at some reasons you may have for not using one and I will argue against them against them:

Poor Reason #1: A wiki is a "new" tool. We can't move our whole Intranet and/or internal training documents there.

Wikis have been around for much longer than you think and been proven as an effective method of keeping information updated.  Don't take my word for it. Look at how some of the following academic institutions are using wikis:

• The University of Minnesota Libraries' Intranet is a wiki.  (Thanks to Jane Klobas' Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration.)
  
• The University of Maryland, Baltimore County's Library is also using a wiki as an Intranet--Confluence, the same platform as Penn State WikiSpaces. (Thanks to May Chang's HighEdWeb 2008 session on Wiki + Shared Drive + DocMgmt = Our Intranet. May is the Head of Library IT services at UMBC.)
  
• Rice University's IT Tutorials are on a wiki--also on Confluence. (Thanks to a discussion with Katy McKinin, Senior Web Designer/Client Relationship Manager, Enterprise Applications at Rice during the Networking hour of HighEdWeb 2008 for sharing the site.)

Poor Reason #2: My audience is internal to my department. I could just use a departmental Intranet site.

Internal documentation and training on your own Intranet site may be fine if your department is a complete silo unto itself, where you have no reason to collaborate or share information with other departments or institutions. But before you decide to use an Intranet, ask yourself:

• Do you ever need to work on internal documentation/training projects with people outside your department? 
• Do you ever need to share a single document or training project on your site at with attendees from another institution?
• Would you like some training materials and/or documents to be made available to prospective employees and/or new hires to sample before they are hired and the account permissions are finally granted to your site?

If there is ever a single possibility of answering "yes" to one of the questions above, consider a wiki for its granular permissions structure.  Permissions to Penn State WikiSpaces can be set for the entire wiki and for each page.  You can manage viewing and/or editing permissions by individual user, user managed groups, or make your wiki page/space available to everyone.  (See ITS Training Services Handout on Penn State WikiSpaces and the Confluence 2.8 User Guide for more information.)

Poor Reason #3: It is important that our content is accurate. We don't want to lose control of the authorship.

• Sometimes locking down the source material too much has the opposite effect. Users create duplicates that you have no control over. For example, how many Web pages related to setting up and/or troubleshooting email do we have at Penn State. (See my post called "This Will Kill That".)
• You should consider a Wikipedia model where the old Intranet author/gatekeepers are now monitoring submissions. They devote less time to creating content, and shift their time to reviewing it. In the previous email example, if all email pages were combined, any content that was department-specific could be moved by the wiki editors into a special table or linked area from the main page on email.
  
• Permissions could be set on content that absolutely must be centrally controlled. (See my arguments under reason #2.)

Poor Reason #4: We have many users who are uncomfortable sharing their work and many users who won't want to learn a new tool.

I've encountered this problem, and it is not insurmountable. Prior to working for Penn State University Libraries I moved Penn State World Campus's Instructional Design & Development internal training site into a wiki.

If populated with useful information and heavily promoted, a good wiki becomes more user-friendly than any other tool you put in front of a user. Here are some tips:

• Understand why your department's culture resists collaboration and take steps to change this. (See my post on why people resist change.)
• Consider getting a pilot group of evangelists (5% of the population). (See my post on how to initiate change.)
• Consider changing the layout and color scheme of your wiki to match your institution's existing Web pages.  Users can rely on their spacial memory of the existing sites to help learn the wiki space and are less aware that the wiki is a new tool. (See pictures of our Penn State University Libraries' Website and my Penn State WikiSpaces Libraries theme below.)
  
• Don't release an empty wiki.  Start with information that needs frequent updates, is not documented, is in demand, or is many-to-many in nature. (See my post on "Wiki Wading".)
• Don't worry about defining the structure ahead of time or getting in turf wars over structure; you'll never get started that way.  If your wiki has a search tool, use it.  You'll find what you need without a preordained structure.
• Create tags/labels for "Newbies" and "QuickStart", so that you can create automatic pages for new hires and frequently accessed information based on items that use those labels.
  
• Nothing on a wiki is missing or wrong; you just haven't contributed to it yet.
• Put important information on the wiki and then email the URL to the group, thus leading them to the wiki.
• Don't tell them what they need to know; tell them where to find it. Repeat the phrase, "It's in the wiki."
• Distribute the documentation workload (and get them to use the wiki) as you train: teach them, but ask them to add it to the wiki. Edit their work as you check for understanding.

Once again, I'm going to pull a James Burke on my readership (or lack thereof, since I am a slacker-blogger), and pull together some theme from throughout my readings and experiences of late.

Let's start with Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.  I've been wanting to read this book for some time and will be blogging much more about it in future.

But for now, this: Shirky notes that the complexity of any organization increases at a rate greater than the organization's size.  And, that hierarchical organizational structures can reach a ceiling where they can no longer function efficiently as other groups because of the amount of administrative overhead (meetings, paperwork, etc.) involved with a large number managing people through so many layers of management on an org chart.

What that means for us is that for those of us working in a large organization there are challenges to getting things done, because the size of the organization itself creates layers of complexity that smaller groups do not have to contend with.

On top of that, add our natural inclination in higher education and IT to use buzzwords and jargon.  Sometimes it's our isolation within a community of like-minded people that makes us forget how to communicate with the people we serve who may be outside our realm of experience.  Experience can, after all, play tricks on us.  Polly LaBarre cites an example of how Google and other companies tries to overcome the experience trap and "how to cultivate inexperience" on the Mavericks at Work blog.

Enter Bob Sutton's latest blog post.  While most of us are familiar with the vagaries of jargon-heavy goals, Sutton talks about a Procter and Gamble CEO who attributes his success to making his message "Sesame Street Simple".

Why does he choose to "dumb down" his message?  If your goal changes with the latest trend or if the language is too complex or vague for everyone in the organization to follow, it's easy for everyone (from managers on down) to "play along" and look like they are working towards it while accomplishing very little.  If you can define your priorities in short, simple terms that easily translate to staff at all levels and across language barriers, it becomes starkly obvious who is not on board with the mission.

Sometimes it helps to have a fresh set of eyes question how we present things.  When I have a project that needs to reach an audience, I typically go to Robin Smail or Sylvia MacKinnon, people who have a talent in seeing through the jargon and complexities we attach to our efforts. 

What does Sesame Street Simple have to do with you?  Good IT, good teaching/training, and good leadership are all about good communication.  And good communication means getting your message to your audience.  Find people brave enough to ask questions.  Survey the projects that are within your control (and the ones outside of it, if you'd like).  Are they Sesame Street Simple or would the people you serve feel like they have been dropped into a midseason plot of Lost?  Feel free to post your comments, or examples of projects and processes that are Sesame Street Simple or just plain Lost below:

That said, from the organizational perspective, and that of the technology training perspective (and previous IT support hats I've worn), there's something else I like to see as we evaluate incoming new hires: their technological skill and willingness to learn.

Let's face it.  There are very few roles left at Penn State that don't touch a computer anymore, even if it's just to do an SRDP.  If securing our machines is important, ensuring that we hire people who can operate them is key to this security.  The key to future success is good hiring.  Or conversely, as Geek Squad Founder Robert Stephens is apt to say, "Training is a tax you pay for a lousy hiring environment."

Now, I'm certainly not saying that training could ever replaced (or that I agree with all of his tactics), but there is some truth to the insight that with the right kind of people--those with "curiosity, ethics, and drive"--teaching is less an act of tracking people down and force-feeding and more of a partnership.

If hiring will help in the future, what about people in existing positions?  Where is your technological skill?  Do you have the skills necessary to do your job today? To explore how you may be doing your job in 18 months?  Are you willing to learn?  Are you willing to teach yourself?

There are many IT and training people out there who are willing to help you, but you must also make that leap to help yourself.  Because you can't say IT's not you job anymore.  If all else fails, IT's the "other duties as assigned."

Many businesses knee-jerk and feel obligated to hide problems from customers (or more importantly, shareholders) rather than shake their confidence. Not with Netflix.  The truth was out there, and they were ready to apply a 15% credit to accounts at a loss to the company of $3 million.  So what happened to Netflix shares when this information got out?  Did they drop?  Nope.

Imagine if they tried to conceal the information.  In the information age, with unofficial blogs like Hacking Netflix, what would speculation have done to share prices?  Maybe it would have taken a dive similar to the Apple shares when investors speculated over Steve Jobs' health.

So this brings me to my thought for the week.  The Internet is a free place (at least until Net Neutrality is utterly obliterated, anyway).  As long as it is free, you may be able to control the information on your site, but you will have very little success getting a grip on what everyone else on the Internet is doing.  Just ask Steve Jobs (the fake one, not the one mentioned above). Just ask WikiLeaks. Just ask the Internet Archive, the EFF, and the FBI.

Our systems of information control (intranet knowledge bases, secret Excel files and Word files on a shared drive, or the manual that the one staff assistant who has worked in the department for twenty years keeps at his/her desk, etc.) may have worked 15, 10, or even 5 years ago.  Things could be locked down and controlled. Whispers and rumors of alternate information only went as far as cubes and copy machines.

In the bad old days, if your knowledge base did not meet user needs, they might not use it. Today in the Web 2.0 world, if it does not meet their needs, they will make something else.  (Psst. If you haven't already, now's the time to read my previous post on Death by Committee; Contraception by Silo.)

Do you see the dramatic irony here?  In the attempt to lock down and control information to keep it pure and accurate, we create a situation where users go elsewhere, make duplicates that are no longer under control and can longer be updated, accurate, or blessed by the central authority.

Wouldn't a Wikipedia model make much more sense?  You could allow your community to contribute to the knowledge base, but re-purpose your gatekeepers as reviewers of the contributions.  Instead of having to keep up with the authoring and updating  and becoming bottlenecks of all the documentation, they can delegate to the community and become reviewers of this work.

As a testament to our walled-off departmental-units, we fortify our documentation in all its monolithic grandeur to stand rock-solid and unchanged by rival city-states (or departments).  In the meantime, we could be could be using Wikis and other collaborative tools to transcend the walls erected by physical location, department, and job title to get some work done.  The metaphor, of course, is much better when Victor Hugo used it for another game-changing technology for one of my favorite chapters of The Hunchback of Notre Dame:

...everything changes. Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only more durable and more resisting than architecture, but still more simple and easy. Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg's letters of lead are about to supersede Orpheus's letters of stone...

In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. In the days of architecture it made a mountain of itself, and took powerful possession of a century and a place. Now it converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself to the four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once...

A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far! How can it surprise us that all human thought flows in this channel? ... But architecture will no longer be the social art, the collective art, the dominating art...

The press, that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the intellectual sap of society, belches forth without pause fresh materials for its work. The whole human race is on the scaffoldings. Each mind is a mason. The humblest fills his hole, or places his stone.

What I began thinking about is something I've been interested in for a long time.  How do you get people engaged, so engaged that you can get large groups to embrace change and spread a new idea or a new tool into mass adoption?

For those of you interested in some great resources on the topic (I promised Allan I'd give up my sources for my crazy ideas):

• Dave Balter's The Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II (available at Amazon, or as a free PDF here)
  
• Polly LaBarre & Bill Taylor's Maverick's at Work (I know, I mention this one a lot)
• Various posts from Bob Sutton related to creating infectious engagement
• A study on flock mentality
  

Social Experiment #1

You might consider me a social engineer of sorts.  In high school as a practical joke, my friend and I decided to make up a fictitious holiday, Adopt-a-Leaf Day, where we tried to get high school students (appearance-conscious as they are) to wear fall leaves on their clothing.

In the morning, most people shunned the leaves and thought them silly; but as they day went on and we got a few people to wear them, people began asking for leaves.  People wore them without even knowing why.  One student assumed it was environmental.  Some teachers asked if these were "gang-related".  (I should mention my high school had about 2000 students, so they feared any mass uprising.) By the end of the day, we couldn't walk down the hall without seeing a number of students wearing leaves.  Those few who knew where is started even wanted us to continue the "holiday" the following year and into college.

Subsequent Experiments

Since those days, I've been a part of a number of social experiments. These include both serious work-related endeavors, like getting people to adopt wikis and planning traveling mini-conferences, and more trickster antics, like Twitter alter egos and secret societies of impropriety.

At first glance, you may think my trickster stunts have nothing to do with my work-related activities, but activities like calling me "Doctor Nikki" as I present basic IT topics and turning the Web Conference into a fashion show straddle the line between educational and entertainment.  They are a means to engage and convert large numbers of people in introductory-level topics with silly, somewhat gimmicky extended metaphors.

Conclusion

In Mavericks at Work, engagement begins with an engaging cause, a mission.  If I can't motivate myself, and a core group of champions (5% of my target audience, according to the flock article, if you buy it), how will I build the momentum needed to engage others?  Turn Web Authoring into a fashion show? People will buy in to it. Get some friends to ratify "Articles of Impropriety" as a work-unrelated gag? Yeah, we'll do that.

Now we come to the snowball effect of engagement.  First, you have the snowball effect in terms of ideas.  Yesterday, Allan talked about the Twitter enthusiasts who had created avatars, stickers, and contributed to ideas for LDSC.  When you add some fun, you also have the added bonus of breaking down barriers of entry to technology and language.  Side projects allow you to meet new people socially first, then feel comfortable asking questions and collaborating on ideas later.

The second snowball effect of engagement is the number of people. I saw this with LDSC yesterday.  People who had created Twitter accounts and abandoned them returned.  People who had not considered Twitter created accounts for the first time.  My Twitter was flooded with new participants.  As champions adopt and show enthusiasm, people who were neutral start adopting. Eventually, the people against your cause become the minority.  They have the choice of missing out and being conspicuous or joining the group as the snowball becomes an avalanche making its way toward them...

• Dave Balter's Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II;
• Evan Rosen's Culture of Collaboration;
• David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous; and
  
• Bill Taylor and Polly LaBarre's Mavericks at Work.

It is the last of these that keeps drawing me back, and the one that I'd really like to talk about, even though everyone else will be talking about the third one on the list for our Brainstorming Bookclub.

Mavericks & the Use of Strategic Vocabulary

In Mavericks at Work's "What You Think Shapes How You Talk—Creating a Strategic Vocabulary", LaBarre and Taylor talk about how language itself can help create an innovative culture.  One example they cite is how Cranium does has it's own unique language, right down to official titles.  There is no C.F.O; Cranium has a "Professor Profit" instead.

Because of my former life as an English teacher, and my current time in IT, I am absolutely fascinated with how language shapes behavior.  You may have even read a blog post about it from time to time here.  We IT folk may withhold communication as a defense mechanism or use over-technical language to establish our status.  I find similar behavior, intentional or unintentional throughout academia.

True, some level of familiarity with or reference to the terminology or theory is necessary, but at times, heavy dependence on such Jargon Monoxide, can have adverse affects on certain audiences.  Additionally, if our language is a reflection of our thoughts and all we do is parrot the language of others, are we really innovating?

Where's Waldo? How to Care for Your Maverick

I came to University Libraries because I sensed from its behavior that it might foster a culture of mavericks.  And I am lucky to be in my department—I-Tech—with it's strategic vocabulary, a maverick within a maverick.  But what if your organization is not a maverick like Cranium (or I-Tech)?  What if your group is cautious, but always asking what you can do to catch up with the cool kids and innovators?  What if?

If you are not a maverick culture, you probably have only one or two mavericks that stand out like Where's Waldo in his stripey shirt among the shirt-sleeved types in your group.  You are probably hoping sooner or later your mavericks, or Waldos, will get the hint and figure or that they, and your organization would be better off if they found a workplace where they fit in better.

Sure, they might be happier at a place like Cranium (or I-Tech), and we might be happy to have them.  But, you're wrong about your organization being better off.  You'd be contributing to your on innovation brain-drain.  Look, you've already got plenty of shirt-sleeved people who've given you what you already do and know, and as the saying goes, "If you always do what you always did, then you always get what you've always got."

If you want real change, look to your mavericks, your Waldos, your renegades.  If they don't fit in the place you put them, make a special place or swat team or project team for them.  If you don't, somewhere more innovative will be happy to take them off your hands...

As mentioned before my heroes are Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People) and Bob Sutton  (The No Asshole Rule).  I find these books to be very useful in navigate organizational politics, especially in the IT world, which has more than its fair share of what Sutton politely calls "jerks".

Long before Blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, we had a name for these jerks when they popped up on forums: Trolls.  The Troll, a particularly nasty beastie, is an intentional jerk; he deliberately tries to provoke his victims.

However, I'd like to talk about his more insidious cousins, those who join Social Networks or forums with the good intentions of forming connections with people, without realizing that they are inadvertently exhibiting antisocial behaviors that damage the very relationships they are attempting to build.

I'll admit, I too, am guilty of causing offense.  As Bob Sutton points out in The No Asshole Rule, no one can go through life without ever having at least a few "jerk" moments.  At some point or another, we all may find ourselves morphing into the impish Corrector, the lowly Whiner, and the aggressive AlphaDog:

The Corrector

Of all the Troll's brethren, the Corrector is the smallest and appears to be the most harmless.  The Corrector will join social networks with the very best intentions; and perhaps in an attempt at being helpful, begin correcting those in his/her immediate sphere. 

Even if constructive criticism is helpful, and even if people solicit feedback, not every person is able to accept it without being defensive.  Thus many of those who come in contact with the Corrector are irritated or uncomfortable.

How to tell if you are a Corrector:

• People get defensive when you correct them.
• People don't want to share their work with you in the first place.
• Others rally to defend the person you correct.

What can you do if you are a Corrector:

• Ask yourself, "Is it more important to correct the person or preserve the relationship?"
• Try leading the person in the direction you were going with your correction, so that the person corrects himself/herself. (Example: "Is this what you were trying to say in your document?")
• If you must make the correction, be subtle.  (Just correct the group document or wiki without calling the other person's attention to the fact that you made some corrections.)

The Whiner

The Whiner, is a lowly creature who hopes to use his or her network to commiserate or effect change on the assumption that the squeaky wheels get results.  I gave this critter his name based on a nickname I overheard for a certain Penn State listserv, now forever burned into my brain as "The Network of Whiners".

The Whiner forgets (or does he?) that while he is complaining about the services offered at his institution, the very people who offer that service take pride in working on those services are part of the same listserv.  The Whiner misses that the overall point was not to abuse the people who provide these services but to network with them.

How to tell if you are a Whiner:

• People get defensive when you whine about them.
• Others rally to defend the person you complain about.
• People eventually ignore or avoid you.

What can you do if you are a Whiner:

• Reframe your complaint into a request.
• Begin your request with a compliment about what you like about a service.
• Realize that the people behind a service are good people even if you think the service is bad.

The AlphaDog

A larger-sized version of the Corrector, the AlphaDog is a territorial beast who needs to dominate his or her subject area by getting "one up" on any potential challenger. 

How to tell if you are an AlphaDog:

• You speak in jargon to a nontechnical audience and they seem clueless.
• Someone postures by attempting to talk-the-talk and you let them have it with a full-on Jargon Monoxide attack.  (You enjoy shooting these posers down.)
• You are uncomfortable in current company, so you use jargon so you don't get eaten alive by even bigger AlphaDogs.

What to do if you are an AlphaDog:

• Adapt your language to the level of your audience.
• Realize that someone who is posturing may just need to feel comfortable.

For a more on testing for "jerk" behaviors, check out Bob Sutton's Arse Test.  To learn about how to correct your own "jerk" behaviors, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.