Don't Swat the Dog

I was speaking with someone the other day about a junior manager on his team who, no matter how often he’s told about it, “loses his cool” and gets somewhat caustic with front-line subordinates.

The view of the person I was speaking with was that the solution was to point out consequences.

“What kinds of consequences?” I asked.

“Well, that when they do something, like being terse or flippant with direct reports, there have to be consequences,” he replied.

“There HAVE TO BE or there ARE?” I was trying to get at whether he was coming from the point of view of punishing the person, in order to teach a lesson, or educating the person, in order to help create better consequences.

I was disappointed to hear him ultimately argue that, “If this guy doesn’t lighten up with his people, I’ll have to demote him.”

For me, his stance was like rolling up a newspaper and swatting a dog.

Admittedly, I fell into speech mode.

“When this manager has the impulse to get terse, he obviously has the opportunity to make a different choice—it’s just that he can’t quite manage his impulse to be mean. So, I believe we need to educate him on two things: that the terse response is ultimately counter productive and that, by going the terse route, he is somewhat robotically responding to a trigger. He can pre-empt that robotic response if he chooses to. But it requires a certain level of clarity and a kind of robust intentionality, a will to change. And it is our job to nurture this wilfulness. One way to do this is to show him how we can separate who he is from how he behaves at these times. Indeed, he is NOT his behaviour, and, in fact, we value his BEING, if you will. Then he is far more able to manage his impulse to be terse—particularly if we make the undesirable outcomes of his terseness clear. For example, believe it or not, we can say the equivalent of ‘I love you Billy Bob, but getting so terse with your people is not okay with me.’”

“In fact,” I added, “I think you are committing the same offense yourself. You are creating a kind of conditionality for this person. He punishes his people with his terse blurts; and you punish him with implicit threats of ‘change or else!’”

And then I admitted that I was doing the same kind of thing myself. I react strongly to images of swatting a dog and all the stuff surrounding that metaphor.

Then we laughed. And he assured me; I was okay. However, he added with raised eyebrows, “But I’m NOT going to say I love you.”