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The Purpose Driven Blow-Up

The other day I was visiting with a client (I will call him John – I have changed the name to protect the innocent) about the growth he is experiencing through our engagement. When we began working together, John often sharply criticized his team. I would not say he had an anger problem, but he did not know how to create the change he needed without getting uptight about it. He was willing to yell so much that his people learned to just ignore him when he did it.

Much of the work that we are doing together is focused on helping him communicate more effectively. It is easy to see the difference. Not only is he feeling good about his improvement, but his team is also reporting growth in this area. The president of the organization is also noticing this modification and is beginning to talk with John about some new responsibilities. It is exciting and fun to share these triumphs with him.

I Did That On Purpose

During our conversation, John told me about a recent experience he had with his team. His organization, like so many others, is facing some significant challenges which are strongly related to the current economic conditions. His team is much smaller now than it was before and they are expected to do a lot more work, even though they have fewer people.

Some of the team members are feeling the stress and often comment about the difficult work load. John has done his best to be understanding with the team, but he is getting tired of them using this challenge as a reason to complain about everything that is going wrong. 

His team was given a rather urgent assignment that needed to be completed without affecting the time tables for the other work that they are doing. The team thought it was impossible and began complaining immediately. He listened for a moment, but then decided it was time to get very vocal about this situation. He said he felt like he was on sinking ship and nobody on board was willing to do anything to help save their own lives.

As he listened to the complaints, he felt a desire to start yelling orders. He had not raised his voice with his team for nearly six months. He did not want to go back to being who he was, but he realized that this moment called for something more drastic. He decided to raise his voice. He called the situation what it was – a necessary process the organization needed to accomplish in order to stay in business. He said that he knew that they did not have enough people to do everything, but that did not change the fact that they needed to get this done. He said he was tired of the team reciting "too few people" every time they were asked to do something. He said that they should all be thankful to have a job and that they should be willing to do what it takes to keep it. He told them it was time to start asking "how can we do this?" instead of just saying, "this can’t be done." He said all of this in a yell, but he said it was a different kind of yell than the one he used before. This time he was in control of it. He could tell that he did what he did on purpose and with purpose. 

New and Improved Results

John told me that as soon as he said what he wanted to say, he left the team to itself. He returned to his office worrying that he had just destroyed a years worth of work in less than a minute’s time. Even though he felt like he did the right thing, he was worried that the team would say, "there goes John again – let’s just ignore him."

Nobody did that, in fact the opposite occurred. Many of the team members came by his office to thank him for what he did. They said he helped them put things in the right perspective and that they were ready to go to work. I am not suggesting that everybody suddenly felt good about the situation or about John’s outburst, but they respected what he said and recognized the truth in it. They could see that they needed to change the way they were looking at things so that the team could continue to be effective during these challenging time. The elevated tone punctuated the circumstances and made the message more powerful. It would have been difficult to accomplish this outcome if he whispered that change was needed.

What Do You Think?

I spent some time finding out how John felt about what he did. He said that he thought that this particular behavior fit very well with those circumstances. He liked that he did it on purpose and that he didn’t just fly off into a rage.

Do you think there are times when it is appropriate to direct our raised voices at those we lead? Is it possible to do it without offending others?

How do you communicate urgency to the people around you? What do leaders you respect do when they urgently need all hands to be on deck and at full attention?  

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Live Today! Love Today!

Andrew Thorn

760-559-3548

 

 

 

Tags: Carpe Articulum, Heart Might Mind & Strength, Leader Behaviors, Life Leadership Harmony, The Authentic Me, The Game of Life, The Telios Experience

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.