In Monday's Slacker Manager blog, Phil Gerbyshak responded to a question from a reader who had been fired for going public with her organizational complaints on the net. Phil handled the question superbly from the perspective of a tech manager who also happens to be a well-known blogger.
I want to add to Phil's blog, but from a different perspective, that of new manager skills. Protecting your company's strategy, processes and reputation is one of those managerial responsibilities you don't learn about until there's a need for it. It's actually an act of street smarts or social intelligence, but since there is no handbook on either, it takes time to learn and recognize its importance.
Though they rarely use this language, executives tend to view certain recurring complaints by employees as a form of organizational and personal attack. Most execs have little patience for complainers and readily assign them to the never-never land of whiners who refuse to grow up. That puts a permanent ceiling on their future and may result in termination, given the opportunity.
FYI: Although complaint or whining is not punishable by death, termination may be the consequence under any number of organizational guises. Mergers and acquistions, strategic alignment, plummeting revenue and outsourcing all provide legitimate means for organizations to relieve themselves of these workers. Obviously, they may never learn the reason for lay-off, but duplicity is not a rare act for companies liable to suit for dismissal without cause. Rahm Emmanuel's comment fits these needs perfectly:
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
Aside from personal non-business unhappiness, I've found that complaints have four different sources:
- Recent grads sometimes bring processes and expectations from their college background, expecting that their employer will accept their recommendatation willy nilly. The uninitiated avoid the hierarchy and go straight to senior management. Inevitably (and it is inevitable), senior management rejects both the approach of these grads and their ideas.
- Recent hires who are experienced employees bring process notions and attitudes from their previous firm, not understanding that their recommendations won't fit the current firm's culture. (Although hired for their task skills, studies show that employees from other firms often bring unwelcome behaviors and attitudes.)
- Over time most firms develop processes to fit their product and customer needs. The rationale for such processes is not usually explained as a part of new employee assimilation, leaving the worker in a knowledge limbo.
- Better firms align their operations to specific business strategies. Few employees understand business strategy until they achieve director or group manager level. Since strategy is rarely obvious at lower levels, it may result in a failure to make sense of organizational processes.
Although most employees are not perturbed by such situations, a small percentage will readily complain about the organization. On the one hand, some of these employees may become exceedingly valuable to an organization because of their insights and commitments.
On the other hand, some employee insights and complaints have negative implications. In those settings it's a manager's role to create work expectations, draw behavioral parameters and deal constructively with complainers. Verbal complaining may need to be dealt with much the way you deal with verbal harassment. Although employees have been educated regarding harassment, they also need to be educated about the morale issues of complaining. And, you will need to help them problem solve their issue, or even recommend that an employee might be happier in another firm.
With awareness, managers can become especially useful to their employees, circumventing much potential frustration through the educational process. However, it is important to move fast when you learn of complaints to keep them from festering.
The fact of the matter is that many employees are grossly unaware of the cultural rules about complaining. Street smarts is developed over time. It's not innate. And so these settings are a natural for teaching employees to bring their complaints--with recommendations--to their manager. Failure to deal with complaints early on can make employees far more difficult to deal with once their ideas have been personally institutionalized.
This may sound tough and insensitive but it's more reality than most want to admit.
I'm sure some of you will disagree, but I'm very curious about your attitude and questions toward these issues.
