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How to do a good job of whining By Lucy Kellaway
THE last time I had my highlights done, my hairdresser told me he had just hired a life coach. This coach, he said as he slapped colour onto sections of my hair, was brilliant and was helping him to work on his integrity. The news troubled me for two reasons. First, I do not want my hairdresser to work on his integrity. One of the things I most like about him is the way he throws integrity to the wind and tells me that I look wonderful. Every time the tinfoil comes off the hair, he exclaims over how the gold has warmed up the silver - in defiance of the harsh truth that the yellowish dye has covered up a bit more of the rampaging grey. It was also troubling because it made me wonder if there is anyone left in the world without a coach. A colleague in the US tells me that even students now have career coaches. Most of my acquaintances in business seem to have executive coaches. And two of my friends have recently gone a step further - they have become coaches. I even have a coach myself, although how this came about I am not sure as I do not pay the man and have never met him. He is called Sean McPeat and has taken it upon himself to send me monthly coaching e-mail messages. His most recent message is all about moaning. This is a subject that I know a lot about after decades as a practitioner. Sean's concern is to help me eradicate moaners from my team and turn them into a team of 'pro-active doers'. He tells me about one German company where moaning has been made illegal. 'Lucy - how many people would be left in your company if you had a 'three moans and you're out' policy? Not many, maybe?' He then signs off 'to your success. Sean'. Sean is right. There would be precious few people left in my office if moaning were outlawed. Yet what he does not grasp is that these would not be people I care to work with. I know just three colleagues who never, ever moan and all are slightly spooky - I would not trust any of them an inch. Moaning is an expression of pain and misery, or at least of fed-upness. It is part and parcel of the human condition as seen in almost all offices. Generally, it comes without any suggestion of remedy and is entirely negative. But this does not make it a bad thing; as a general rule, if you take the negative away, the positive means much less. And the simple act of moaning (if done correctly, and I shall explain how in a minute) can even lessen the fed-upness a bit. While a little moaning can be good, a great deal is always awful. People who moan a lot are a bore to themselves, and lethal to others. In fact, I find heavy-moaning workmates even more toxic than those who are lazy, spiteful or back-stabbing. Moaning is a bit like salt in the diet. You need some of it to bring out the taste in your food. Yet too much is fatal. So the question that Sean should be asking is not how to eliminate moaning, but how to get the most out of moaning, both for the moaner and for the moanee. The first step is to set quotas. I think moaning should take up between 2 and 5 per cent of the day, so that in an eight-hour day, between 10 and 24 minutes should be devoted to a good moan. Anyone who is regularly over the upper limit should consider cutting back. Though if something really awful were to happen one day, you may exceed it so long as you make up for it by under-moaning on other days. For the moaner, I have three tips to improve the quality of the experience. The first is to try to make it funny. A moan with a few sarky jokes attached is a pleasing thing. It makes your moaning less depressing and will make you even more popular among the moanees. The second is to vary the content. People who bang on obsessively about how there is nothing nice to eat in the canteen or how much work they have got to do, or how unappreciated they feel, are just boring. I have a wide variety of things I can moan about, and flit from one to another quite effortlessly. The third is to pick your moanee with care. Moaning only really works between people at the same level in the hierarchy. Moaning upwards is dangerous and only advisable if you also have a constructive suggestion to make. Moaning downwards is always a bad idea. As you will be paid more and have control over those below you, they are not going to be impressed at your catalogue of woes. The best people to moan to are the ones who reciprocate with moans of their own. Mutual moaning can be good - but can also be dangerous if you egg each other on into a downward moaning spiral. The best moaning partners moan towards a sort of closure. You moan, the other person moans, you both say: what a nightmare. And then you say: ah well. And then back to work. From the moanee's point of view, being moaned to can be nice. I quite like it when people whose lives and jobs I had thought gilded embark on a moan. It makes me feel better by contrast. However, the most important weapons for the moanee are defensive. Listening to too much moaning saps the energy and infects you with their disaffection. Given this risk, you can afford to be ruder to moaners than you might otherwise be. To silence them you can start looking at your watch. Or stand up, or start typing. Say 'oh dear', but without conviction. And if this fails there is another tip for an exhausted moanee. Tell the moaner to hire a coach. It will cost them dear, but it might get them off your back. -- FINANCIAL TIMES (reproduced in The Straits Times, 20 July 2006) |