“Why are you telling me? What do you think I’m going to do about it?” These were the thoughts going through my head as I sat in another late-night meeting listening to a team struggling with a problem.
Here in the UK, we have a reputation for being a bit whingy, particularly with our friends in the southern hemisphere. As with many reputations it’s not wholly true, but there is an inner truth to it. There have been many times when interactions with my countryfolk have been heavily moan laden.
From this evidence some might conclude that we are good at moaning, but the reality is, our inbuilt timidity makes us awful complainers.
I was at the gym the other week, and this was the conversation in the sauna:
- Me: “I see that the showers are out of action again.”
- Other Gym Member: “Yes, they’ve been out for a couple of days this time.”
- Me: “I wonder how long they are going to be out.”
- Other Gym Member: “No idea. Have you complained to anyone?”
- Me: “No.”
- Other Gym Member: (Looks back at me and shrugs)
We both know that neither of us are going to do anything about the situation, that’s the end of that conversation.
Part of our reticence is that our expectation of resolution is low, an expectation that has been set by previous experiences trying to find people who can influence an outcome. We know that the kindly young man, in ridiculously tight gym-wear, on the front desk isn’t empowered to resolve the issue. We suspect that even the manager of the gym, who we rarely see, has limited influence. The manager is normally quite good at sorting things. There’s a feeling that this is outside local control and that no one locally is empowered to get the problem resolved. A shared shrug is the best we can do.
It’s worth acknowledging here that everything above is speculation, and the gym manager may have a plan that they are already enacting. We aren’t going to do the work to find out because we’ve taken on a form of learned helplessness. Our desire for change hasn’t overtaken our reticence and so we sit dormant.
The reality is many people live much of their working life in similar situations. They want to get something done, but they don’t see a way to get it done. They look at the people around them and don’t see anyone who can resolve the issues that they face. Eventually they turn to moaning and complaining to anyone who is listening. I’ve done it, I suspect we’ve all done it, but it isn’t going to get any of us anywhere. This type of complaining does little more than reduce us to hot air rattling the wind.
What should we do?
One of the challenges I see is that people haven’t learnt to complain effectively, there is an art to effective complaining.
People often complain to people who can’t do anything about the situation that they are complaining about. We need to find the people who are empowered and seek to get them to make a change. That isn’t always as easy as it sounds.
I think that one of the reasons that we dislike call centre interactions so much is that we suspect that the person on the other end of the call, on the other side of the planet, has little empowerment to resolve our issue. We answer the questions that “George” in Hyderabad or Krishna in “Newcastle” has on their list to ask us knowing that the result of this box-ticking-exercise is going to be a second conversation with a “specialist” who is going to ask the same questions. I recently had a situation where I answered the same set of questions for five different specialists who each asked me to try the same things each of which took several minutes. When I asked the third person why we were needing to redo the same tests they told me that they needed to show on the call handling system that they had been done. Eventually the fifth person agreed to send me some new equipment. The only empowerment that “George” had was to get me to the next person, the person with real power was shielded from me.
There are other situations, though, were we need to step outside of our timidity and engage the person who is empowered.
We need to acknowledge our power in these situations. While we can often feel powerless, we often have more power than we think we do. In the gym situation I am a customer, I am paying money, which gives me a voice. I need to be careful how I use it, but it has some weight. In the callcentre situation I knew that my power was in my perseverance and that eventually we would get to the end of the questions. There wasn’t any point in me using my voice to get aggressive I would have been complaining to people who couldn’t change the situation that we both found ourselves in.
We need to change our attitude from one of complaining to one of changing.
“What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.”
Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now
We need to learn to be better complainers. Complaining to the unempowered isn’t changing anything. Complaining to others might make us feel a bit better, but it’s not changing anything either.
Header Image: These are the grounds at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire on a glorious spring day with friends.