Okay… There’s a whole issue with setting yourself in between someone’s expression of frustration at something sucky they experience and the problem itself. One of the things that helps is learning to temporarily shelve your priorities. Listen to people as if you were a complete outsider. Someone is telling you about their feelings and that often isn’t intended to be in competition with your feelings… Until somebody makes it a competition. The minute you try and make it a competition you have demonstrated to that person that you aren’t listening to their concerns. In doing that you make everything about your own priorities and that person who was frustrated isn’t in a place where they have reserves of energy to be kind and you just stepped inside the radius of a problem that you yourself were before only tangential to because you shut them down. Effectively you’ve said “Whatever, let’s talk about my needs.”
This move intended or not sucks all the oxygen in the room that could be devoted to making things better into addressing your problem if some one is empathetic to you or as an extention of the inertia behind addressing problem. Neither is good.
Let’s take an example. Say I go to my boss with a problem. Say it’s a matter of policy and it’s impacting my life negatively. Now my boss maybe didn’t write the rule which created the problem but they’ve enforced it in the past. As I am expressing how this policy effects me the boss starts acting huffy and going “Oh you must think I’m such a bad boss. How could you think that? Don’t you know how much I care about the people in my employ?” All of a sudden as an employee I now have a whole new problem to deal with because this person isn’t going to address my problem, they just became a new problem for me to deal with. Now you have a frustrated employee who isn’t in a position to solve the policy problem either having to console their boss or try and correct them back on course to realizing that the policy problem… Hasn’t changed. Nobody in a place to do better has acknowledged it even exists.
What would you think about the actions of that boss in the employee’s shoes?
