4 steps to stopping complaining spirals in your team

I don’t know how often I have helped leaders with the following problem: Their team is in uproar and upheaval about things that are very hard to change. It may be a new regulation from the government, a company policy that was implemented or a competitor coming out with a better product. When teams see a development as negative, they can start spending a lot of energy complaining about the negative consequences, discussing how stupid the people are who started this development etc. I am sure you know these kinds of meetings: a gripe fest with no outcome except that everyone feels a little bit more miserable and helpless.

Managers and leaders are responsible for furthering a constructive environment in their teams and this is why they need the skills to stop these understandable, yet very unproductive tendencies in their teams. Here is what you can do:

1) Don’t join in

That’s the most important thing. Even if you agree with your team – don’t join in with the complaining. Acknowledge, nod, listen, but don’t join in.

2) Acknowledge without agreeing

You want to help your team to feel heard, but you don’t want to fan the flames of complaining. Here is how you might acknowledge without agreeing:

Team member: “This new documentation requirement sucks! We’ll never get anything done this way! What are they thinking! Bureaucrats! They have never written one line of code and are trying to keep us from doing our work!!”

Manager: “Wow! I’m sorry this upsets you. Can you tell me what exactly you are having difficulties with in the new documentation requirement?”

Team member: “Yeah, it looks like we are going to spend more time documenting than coding!!”

3) Clarify whether change is possible

It helps people to think whether they would like to spend energy trying to do something about the negative development or whether this is something they need to live with. This could sound like:

Manager: “So you would like a different balance?”

Team member: “Yup!”

Manager: “Do you have any concrete suggestions I might feed back to upper management?”

4) Move the discussion toward what is wanted

We have two possibilities here: either there is hope that something can be done about the negative development, then you could start planning how to influence:

Team member: “Yes, we need to let them know that this won’t work”

Manager: “Ok, would you like to sit together and create a document with our arguments?”

Or there is no hope, then you can start working on “living with” or “coping” with the new reality:

Team member: “No, looks like we’ll have to live with the requirement.”

Manager: “Should we brainstorm about how we can keep the documentation time to a minimum, then?

Either way, through not joining, acknowledging but not agreeing, clarifying whether change is possible and moving the discussion toward what is wanted the manager snaps through the negative spiral. From feeling helpless people can move to feeling agency: Either way, they can do something about their situation and hopefully feel less stuck.

If you would like to discuss more around how these Solution Focused methods can be used in management and leadership, why not come to one of our free meetups and exchanges?

‍