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Taming the Abrasive Manager. Laura Crawshaw
Читать онлайн.Название Taming the Abrasive Manager
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781119836421
Автор произведения Laura Crawshaw
Жанр Экономика
Издательство John Wiley & Sons Limited
Within a week of my arrival, I was hired as the first full-time clinician in the first stand-alone employee assistance program (EAP) in the state, embarking on the greatest adventures any tenderfoot clinician could hope for. EAPs provide confidential counseling services to employees and eligible family members experiencing problems in their personal or work lives. Our initially tiny company eventually provided counseling to Alaskan employees (and family members) of over 600 corporations throughout the state. I was trucked up and down the Alaska pipeline in –70◦F (–56◦C) temperatures to explain the benefits of EAP counseling to pump station employees and helicoptered out to Bering Sea drill rigs to deliver the same message to exhausted roustabouts. Back at the office igloo I counseled employees on the problems they experienced at work and home, learning that shooting a spouse’s sled dogs was a reliable indicator of marital distress in Alaska. Another indicator of marital peril lay in the discovery by one newlywed that her gun-loving, hard-drinking husband’s past two wives were buried on her new love’s wilderness homestead. I referred unwilling addicted air traffic controllers into substance abuse treatment and helped wildlife biologists cope with their fears of flying. It was truly the Last Frontier—right down to the guns.
Armed Defense
The guns? I encountered the guns in the course of my counseling work. The typical scenario consisted of a call from an employee for a same-day appointment because he (they were always men) ‘‘needed to talk to someone right away.’’ We took these quiet, urgent calls seriously, reshuffling our schedules for such sudden requests. I would find myself seated across from the client, who was usually withdrawn and obviously embarrassed to be sitting in a counselor’s office. My questions of ‘‘How can I help you? Could you tell me what’s going on?’’ would elicit a halting story of suffering. The suffering was inflicted by the employee’s boss, whose behavior could take many forms, such as tyrannical control or public humiliation of the employee. The variations never failed to amaze me, but the common theme was of abrasive behavior that had pushed the employee to the point of . . . what? To find the answer, I uttered the psychotherapist’s classic question:
Counselor: And how does this make you feel?
Employee: Like getting back at him.
Counselor: Have you thought of how you would do that?
Employee: Yeah. [An embarrassed silence.] With a gun.
Counselor: Do you have a gun?
Employee: Uh . . . yeah . . . out in my truck. That’s why I called you.
The same pain that cut through me as a child when confronted with suffering now sliced through my adult soul. This man was suffering—tormented by his impulses to silence his tormentor, shamed by his loss of control, and humiliated by his need to seek external restraint for his retaliatory impulses. He had reached the point where he saw his gun as his only remaining defense against his boss’s aggression. He was one of many, and as the arsenal in our office safe increased, I wondered how this could be happening. Having experienced good parents and good bosses, I was mystified—why would bosses brutalize their employees, and how could companies tolerate this infliction of suffering? What were the dynamics of aggression and defense that created such profound anguish? These questions set this boss whisperer on a journey to understand these unmanageable managers and learn how to tame their abrasive aggression.
2 Boss Whispering
I have a confession to make: I don’t call myself a boss whisperer in real life. I refer to myself as an executive coach, the standard term applied to coaches who work with businesspeople. I have mixed feelings about the executive coach label because it suggests that I restrict my coaching to the upper echelons of bossdom, otherwise known as the C-level: CEO, COO, CIO, CFO, and assorted other chiefs. I am distinctly uncomfortable with such an elitist conceptualization of coaching and have to restrain my potentially abrasive comments when other coaches boast that they work exclusively with top executives, as if this were some sort of badge of honor. I’m not terribly impressed with physicians who take pride in treating only the wealthy or powerful—it doesn’t make them better doctors. Bosses at every level struggle with management challenges, and to limit their access to coaching because of the outrageous fees charged by many of these C-level coaches is, I believe, unethical. Tirade over.
Back to my confession about the boss whisperer title: when I was a doctoral student I couldn’t resist buying a book whose title promised that a dissertation could be written in only fifteen minutes a day. What a promise! What a title! What a gimmick! Not far into the first chapter the author confessed that the probability of completing one’s dissertation in one’s lifetime by writing for only fifteen minutes a day was pretty low. She was right—I upped my minutes, finished my dissertation, and to this day admire her ability to come up with a catchy title and deliver some very helpful wisdom. I trust you’ll excuse this so-called boss whisperer from using similar tactics so long as I pitch forth with some helpful horse (or should I say boss) sense.
Boss Whispering
Even though I don’t initially refer to my work as boss whispering, the term roughly describes what I do. Much like the horse whisperer who calms unmanageable horses, I work to calm the fears that drive abrasive bosses to trample on others’ emotions. I became a boss whisperer the same way that horse whisperers start, by carefully observing horses (or in my case, bosses) and trying to understand why they behave as they do. This requires trying to get into their heads and see the world through their eyes. This process of observing behavior in order to decipher its meaning is actually the process of empathy. Empathy doesn’t mean feeling for (sympathy)—it means feeling into, or feeling with, as in putting one’s self into the shoes (or hooves) of other beings to better understand the feelings that motivate their problematic behaviors. Using empathy, the whisperer gains insight into the abrasive behaviors and translates this insight into methods specifically designed to calm the horse (or boss) and eliminate the maladaptive behavior without the use of force or intimidation.
Calm the fears that drive abrasive bosses? Because of their intimidating, aggressive styles, it can be a stretch to believe that these fear-inspiring individuals are themselves driven by fear. I’ll discuss this concept in greater detail in Chapter Four, but for now I want to emphasize that emotions drive, or move, behavior: the word emotion is derived from the Latin emovere (‘‘to move out’’). To understand behavior, one must seek to understand the underlying emotions that move (motivate) the behavior. I call this reading emotions—putting yourself in another’s shoes (in other words, using empathy) to decipher the fears motivating problematic behavior. Horse whisperers spend a lot of time hanging around the ol’ corral, observing what motivates horses to do what they do. As a subordinate, peer, executive, and boss whisperer, I’ve spent a lot of time in corporate corrals observing boss behavior. But my training in whispering started long before those years spent with bosses—I’d been reading emotions since I was knee-high to a psychiatrist.
My Apprenticeship in Emotional Literacy
Remember that my earliest lessons in suffering were taught by animals. However, my earliest lessons in reading emotions were imparted by humans and, more specifically, by my father. This should come as no surprise: if you’re the child of an auto mechanic, chances are pretty good that