Truth 23. Your biggest complainer may be your best supporter
Who doesn’t love that Jerry Maguire moment when Jerry, fed up with being forced to perform in a way that’s counter to his values, writes and releases to the world a scathing “manifesto?” The next morning, he arrives at work to a standing ovation from all his coworkers. And, inevitably, he receives the invitation from management to seek his fortune elsewhere.
If some sort of machine could capture all the thoughts of anyone who has ever watched this movie, there would be transoceanic freighters full of little thought balloons that read, “Yup, that’s me. I’m Jerry.” But when you’re in management, you may be Jerry in your heart, but you’re the boss in fact. And this is no longer the Jerry-era of internal e-mails. This is the age of the blog, Facebook, and Twitter. Welcome.
There’s the guy I know who actually did pull a Jerry, unburdening himself on a publicly accessible company blog. And, as the young legend has it, he actually came to work the next day to coworkers applauding from their cubicles. Unlike the movie Jerry, though, this guy kept his job. I know this because the CEO told me himself. As a point of pride.
The fact that this Jerry still has his job speaks volumes about the company. The founders and the leaders can take it on the chin—and still be glad to see this guy in the morning. Jerry is irreplaceable, a valuable employee who has been with the company from its earliest days. And although maybe the blog might not have been the best space for airing his grievances, what was done was, well, done. Out there in the universe forever.
What Jerry really did was put the company’s culture to the test. The leaders have long said that they want a passion-fueled company where all employees are free to speak their mind. But, when employees get passionate, it’s not always a happy passion. And what might be perceived as negative passion can be really embarrassing. But it’s also extremely informative.
In this particular case, Jerry, who had been with the company from almost Day One, was worried that the company culture that everyone had so carefully cultivated and cherished was being diluted by waves of newly hired middle managers who (mistakenly) assumed that their power lay in blocking freely flowing information from the rank and file and their beloved CEO. Passionate rank and file can tell you so much about what’s really going on in your company’s culture: how healthy your network of trust is among all your employees, that essential innovation is being undermined by turf battles, or that a team lead on the graveyard shift is jeopardizing your entire Asia operation because he prefers volume over quality when it comes to customer service-resolution reports. These are the kinds of things you won’t know unless your people care enough, are angry enough, and feel safe enough to tell you. Over and over again—or publicly—if that’s what it takes to get your attention.
These are the kinds of things you won’t know unless your people care enough, are angry enough, and feel safe enough to tell you.
As your team’s leader, you can’t prevent your employees from venting their frustrations on a public blog. Your power lies in helping your employees trust that they don’t have to go to such extremes to get the results they’re looking for. To achieve this shift, you have to make your office a safe place where people with issues can come and let ’er rip:
• Learn to love complaints. If you yearn for the command-control days when managers had the last word, you were born several decades too late. In most workplaces that embrace employee engagement and foster innovativeness, all employees are encouraged to “own” their roles in the organization. It’s only fair, because, unlike any other time in modern workplace history, they’re directly responsible for their own outcomes. When an employee is so worked up about something going on in the company that he is willing to put his job on the line, that’s a sign of caring more about the business than his own best self-interests. Annoying as that might be for you, that’s actually a good thing.
• Learn to welcome the complainer. Some people are real pains in the posterior—precisely because they’re passionate about the prospect of your enterprise. The ones who don’t really give a darn... well, they’re awfully quiet. It’s quite possible that they’re passively disengaged. Which is okay if you don’t mind giving valuable salaries to human doorstops. But being passively disengaged is just one step away from being disengaged. And that’s where you’ll begin to have real problems with toxic whiners infecting the entire workplace with their bummer attitude. Weirdly, the inflamed blogger who spews his fury publicly might actually be the better employee.
• Let the complainer have his say. People go public with their rage when they’re confident that they won’t be heard privately. He knows what’s really going on in your company. He’s got valuable information and insights for you that you might not get anywhere else. And he cares so much about your business that he’s willing to put his job on the line. Let him take that risk behind closed doors. Don’t make him have to resort to HTML.
Public embarrassment of the blog kind is really too bad—maybe even horrifying, depending on the content and the timing. But don’t be afraid of the truth. Even when it’s the hard truth. The real truth is that if it gets to the point where your people have to go public, you probably have only yourself to blame.