Complaints Are Opportunities in Disguise
Complaints Arise From Thwarted Dreams
It can be frustrating to be doing your best and hear complaints. Acting out of such frustration frequently has a negative impact on relationships and rarely yields effective solutions.
Learning to respond to complaints as useful messages without getting caught in emotional reactivity prevents negativity feedback loops.
When do people complain?
People complain when they care and don’t believe they have the power to make change.
People don’t complain if they don’t care.
People who care about the outcomes of what they are working on will get irritated if they are prevented from accomplishing those goals. People who don’t care will put up with anything without complaining.
Employee engagement isn’t about having employees who are always happy. It is about having employees who are invested. Invested employees will complain about unaddressed problems.
People complain when they don’t believe they have the power to effect change.
People who believe they have the power to effect change take action when they see problems that need to be addressed. They do not waste energy complaining.
Power can come in the form of permission, authority, capacity, skills or resources.
Listen for the Dream behind the Complaint
Every complaint comes from the absence of something the complainer wants. To make use of the complaint to improve your organization or the relationship with this person, you need to work with the underlying desire.
We often complain when we can’t articulate what’s bothering us. You many need to help someone who is complaining unpack their concern. Here are some questions that might be useful?
What would need to be different for this to stop being a problem?
Why is this a problem?
What’s the impact of this being the way it is?
How is this creating problems?
Taking the complaint seriously without addressing the tone of the complaint builds trust and improves relationships.
Validate the Emotional Experience of the Complainer
People complain when they are hurting.
The problem that is causing the complaint probably doesn’t have an easy solution. If it had an easy solution, it would probably already have been solved.
In situations where dealing with unpleasantness is required, acknowledgment that it is unpleasant helps build compassion and community.
To show the people you work with that you care about them as people and not merely as units of labour, you must show them that you see their pain and honour it. Even better if you can honestly show them it bothers you when things pain them and you do what you can to alleviate such pain.
Training in Better Complaining
It destroys psychological safety to ask people to act like they aren’t hurting when they are. But asking people to get better at expressing their hurt and their wishes for improvement within the organization is good practice.
People complain when they don’t feel they have the power to effect change. One way to reduce complaining is to increase the amount of power people have to effect change. Or even the amount of power they feel they have.
Communication Skills
Most people don’t start their careers with explicit training in emotionally intelligent communication. Organizations who want employees with such communication skills should invest in training for their people.
Internal Sense of Agency
People who are educated or managed in systems that use external rewards and punishments to drive motivation lose their internal sense of agency and power to effect change. Organizations that want to reduce complaining would do well to avoid using extrinsic rewards to motivate employees1 and provide coach training to people managers so they have the skills to help employees reclaim their sense of internal agency.
Complaints Are Opportunities
Complaints come from people who care.
Listen to complaints for the dreams embedded in them and take your people’s pain seriously.
You might find a solution to an organizational problem hiding beneath the complaint.
Even if you can’t make the pain go away, you have an opportunity to improve the relationship with a complaining employee by validating their experience, demonstrating compassion, and letting this organization be a place where the full range of human emotions are acceptable.
See Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Riverhead Books (2011) or Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them, Harvard Business Review Press (2020).