Before relationships are damaged

One of my best jobs was with a management consulting firm in the late 90’s which had a tagline of “Releasing the human spirit at work”. Our role was to help leaders undertaking global business transformations. These special leaders also realized they were not tapping into the full human potential of their employees. Hence, we were hired to help develop a Strategic Intent (an inspiring mission statement) along with Conditions of Satisfaction, which the leadership team would use to measure their success in a specific time period, e.g. 3 years.

Our main work was to conduct education sessions alongwith local leaders to bring alive the desired change in strategy, culture and processes to every employee in every function and region. I got to travel around the world and meet the most amazing people, and I still relish the memories of employees declaring at those sessions either their desire to play the game and innovate at their functional or regional level, or even more moving to me- declared that they realized that corporate work was not their goal, and they would rather be a chef!

While I am dating myself as an old-time consultant doing face to face sessions around the world, I still fondly remember some of our teachings and apply them to our current virtual world. I was trying to launch a team to work in one of the non-profit companies I work with.

As I tried to host meeting after meeting to just get going, we kept running into health issues — including my own; vacations; business conflicts as we all have other commitments as well. I began to see a big complaint build up inside of me and was ready to give up on the team, or at least whine about it!

Then I had an AHA moment. One of the teachings with this transformational consulting firm was “Turn complaints into action”!

Okay, so that means that if I have a complaint, I need to communicate it not as a complaint, e.g. “I don’t think we are doing well as a team”, but rather by transforming it into positive action. Just by lodging a negative complaint we are de-energizing instead of re-energizing!

The action could be in the form of a request to fellow team members to prioritize this team a bit more or it could be an action that I take on behalf of the team or it could be to declare a breakdown and request a recommitment to our original goals and clarifications of whatever was ailing everyone. I will write about the breakdown to breakthrough teaching in my next blog in this series.

I chose the second one and re-energized the team and we made some critical in-time decisions. If the complaint was about another team, we could turn it into requests for action if the action was in their scope. In any case, there are a sea of positive possibilities before we go into the mode of judging and making others wrong. Of course, it is human nature to feel that we are always right and good, but it takes strong intentionality and sincerity to look within ourselves.

Most importantly, I felt a boost of energy from transforming the negative into the positive! And I was proud of how I caught myself not getting into a morose mood, or sulking off, or hurting the team by just withdrawing.

It is a valuable lesson to monitor our moods and the simmering complaints and transform them into a valuable change for all before relationships suffer. Relationships are the foundation of teams, and in fact human relationships are so precious and deserve heart intelligence to sense and make right. This is where I also credit my Sufi training, which teaches me to always have a positive outlook and always work on myself first rather than judging others and silently shame or blame them. Look in the mirror, my Sufi teacher tells us, and polish your heart. Are your intentions pure and good? Are your actions following your intentions and your commitments? Make those right and then go to others to restore the relationships, elevate the trust and connection, and act in alignment with the whole.