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Complaining is not a Strategy
Recent surveys of middle- and upper-managers find that over 55% of their employees consistently complain, that is, their default communication style is passive and ineffective. Complaints include: workload, excess stress, not enough recognition, poor communication, poorly-executed rollouts, lack of time off. Over 73% report that time is wasted and morale decreased by continual employee complaining. Moreover:
Complaining trains the brain to focus on the negative, which can lead to a more permanent pessimism.
Complaining weakens the immune system and increases risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and strokes.
Complaining can create helplessness and more anxiety. It
negatively affects those around.Complaining prevents solutions. People focus on regrets and resentments from the past, fail to live in the present and are unable to plan for the future.
Not good. Let me ask you: In the image below, how does the mouse get the cheese?
by worry (what if the trap goes off)?
by complaining (it’s not fair)?
by pessimism (why bother)?
by cynicism (the system is rigged)?
No! She gets the cheese by replacing passive, ineffective behaviors with active, effective strategies that result in cheese. It’s easier than you think.
First, why is complaining not a strategy? Complaining transfers power to out there, to something else, making individual change impossible. Complaining says: “I am not in control of my life. Everyone else is in control, it’s not fair, and I want to be rescued.”
All suffering is resistance; a refusal to accept the reality of the moment, the unwillingness to experience what is, the unwillingness to be present with, and that unwillingness comes from a story or old belief that things should not be the way they are.
Adapting to change …to life … to the future, means a radical acceptance of reality - of what is. Viktor Frankl was a holocaust survivor who suffered horrendous abuse from 1942-45, later to become a psychiatrist and author of Man’s Search for Meaning. His wisdom:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Second, complaining does not move action forward, in fact, it reverses and stagnates the workplace.
Over the past several years, I have studied the effectiveness of several teams’ decisions to agree to change their team language. With everyone in agreement (the tricky part) they agreed to communicate in the active-optimistic (how can we) rather than the passive-pessimistic (we can’t, we don’t). It took less than 12-14 days to turn around the mindset of the team, to increase engagement and solve current problems.
