I close the year with some final thoughts on whining. My last two tweets were links to Paul Brown’s blog noting successful people do not whine and Dan Rockwell’s advice on dealing with whiners. My brief research did not discover any workplace-relevant research specifically on whining.   However I did find an interesting essay in Skidmore College’s Salmagundi Magazine, “Whining” by Daniel Harris published in 2006. So I close this trilogy on whining with thoughts from Harris’s essay. Any misinterpretations of this essay are mine.

• Our culture creates conditions for whining. We elevate success and instant gratification. Failures to achieve, to advance, to obtain, result in irritation and “petty grievances.”
• Whining is primal, “perhaps the first form of human behavior”, the baby cries for mother’s milk. We learn whining can be nourishing. 
• “Misery may love company but by no means does company reciprocate with the same fond feelings.” (p. 167)
• Because whining is intermittently reinforced, it becomes an enduring habit. It is “fueled by the partial fulfillment of our need for sympathy.”
• “Whining irritates us”, “every whine is a set up”, that preys on our conscience, our goodness, our sense of fairness. 
• Whining is “a form of bad story telling” depicting struggles between whiners and others, such as employee struggles with management, introducing a touch of melodrama into a perhaps otherwise uninteresting narrative.
• “Whiners are resistant to advice because they really don’t want problems solved.” (p. 169)
• Whining can be addictive because it elevates our self-importance vis-à-vis others who just accept their fates.
• Whining focuses on causes outside of one’s self, “through no fault of my own but through your fault, your negligence  . . .  not (shortcomings) of my talent.” (p. 170)

My Take-Aways:

Harris’s unit of analysis is the individual. There are interesting ideas here for research. How does individual whining affect a team, a group? Does it lower productivity? Should the supervisor counsel the whiner? Is whining a blindspot? If the person is not a perpetual whiner, why is this person whining now? Personal, perceptual, and/or attributional errors may be factors.

But what if the whining is situational, the cause shared by others? If many are whining, complaining, perhaps there is something management should address. Leaders should listen and form hypotheses about the nature of the whining. Whining may be a symptom.

Harris, D. (Fall 2005 - Winter 2006). Whining. Salmagundi, 148/149, 165-170. 

In 2013 I became familiar with the growing research on compassion. It was the subject of several of my blogs: compassion and well being, training compassion, on organizations becoming more compassionate naturally. Remembering the great leader Nelson Mandela underscored the importance of compassion in authentic leadership.

Discussions of compassion in my college courses have been-thought provoking.  No topic, however, has generated more soul-searching than  self-compassion. Kristin Neff, Ph.D., University of Texas, is a (if not the) leading scholar in this area. Her website, self-compassion.org, provides information, resources, and exercises. She suggests self-compassion involves:

• Not being so critical in evaluating ourselves and our achievements or lack thereof. Being kind to ourselves, lightening up on judging ourselves harshly, lighten up on criticizing ourselves harshly.
• Let ourselves become more aware of our extended humanity, that we are not the only ones on this planet, that whatever we are experiencing, others are experiencing or have experienced or will experience. We all suffer. We are all part of this family of humanity. The key is feeling this reality. Not just knowing it intellectually.
• Be mindful. Understand all things in balance, even pain. Don’t ignore pain or exaggerate pain. Accept. 

My take-aways:

Why are these holidays such a time of anxiety? Why do we try so hard to please, to seek approval. And when we look back at the year past and forward to the new year, we may do so critically, regardless of our successes and small moments of joy. We all know people who are far too hard on themselves. Perhaps we may be too hard on yourselves.

There is a place in this “always striving” culture for realistic evaluation and goal-setting – but it is easy to become too negative in our self-evaluations. As the social psychologist Leon Festinger pointed out many decades ago, we are social animals. We are always comparing ourselves with others. Sometimes a friend. Sometimes a sibling. Sometimes a parent. We have referents. I think sometimes we could be much gentler with ourselves if we just shift our referent. Adjust the bar. Adjust our goals.

Earlier this year I  found the mediation exercise at the Center for Investigation of Healthy Minds to be helpful and I recommend. And as one who had known some physical pain this year, I know how hard it can be to be in touch with your pain, live with your pain. I did find Neff’s perspective on self-compassion and pain beneficial.

Self-compassion needs to be a larger part of our vocabulary for living. Perhaps it is as easy as loving yourself. How can we truly love others unless we can embrace our own being? 



Image of Dr. Neff obtained from her and used with her permission. 

Many books will be written about the life of Nelson Mandela, this great leader. I do not know his story as well as I should. This morning I listened to Gary Player, the great South African Grand Slam golfer, talking about Nelson Mandela on Mike & Mike on ESPN radio and television. Player said, “I loved this man with all my mind, heart, and soul.” 

I am sure there are many leadership lessons from Mandela’s life story. Here are a few just from listening briefly to Gary Player.

Mandela was humble. Arriving by helicopter to meet with Player, Mandela greeted him with, “Gary, do you remember me?”  On their first meeting Mandela talked about Player and the Grand Slam of golf. He commented after shaking hands with Player that he would not wash his hands for a month.

Mandela was “you” focused, not “me” focused. He understood the importance of talking about the person who he was with, not himself. He made the other person feel special.

Mandela looked forward, not backward. When he emerged after 27 years in prison, he said he felt “no hatred, no need for revenge.” He understood the importance of the message he projected. It was time to look to the future and building a new nation.

Mandela was a sportsman and believed in the power of sports. He was a boxer in his youth. (Actually he loved to run and boxers were among the few in those days who ran regularly.) He believed that sports have the power to change the world and to change people. 

My take-aways:

Great leaders can be humble and make others feel special by word and deed. They must always look to the future. And I agree that playing sports can be a good method for developing leaders.

Nelson Mandela was one of the greatest leaders of my lifetime. Like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., he rose above and led from the high moral ground. For Mandela it was a pragmatic decision. 

Image of Nelson Mandela used with persmission. Image by South Africa The Good News / www.sagoodnews.co.za [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ANelson_Mandela-2008_(edit).jpg    

A blog revisited from October 2012
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Doing some research I came across a Harvard Business Review article from 1977 by Wickham Skinner and W. Earl Sasser, “Managers with impact: versatile and inconsistent.”  One of the topics Skinner and Sasser discussed are patterns of behavior characteristic of less effective managers. Their observations still ring true: 

·        accepting conventional company wisdom without question; example, “we always promote from within”  
·        acting too slowly when changes are needed now
·        tolerating subordinates who are ineffective, hinting at improvements needed instead of taking decisive action
·        not challenging the way things are done, “the way we have always done it”
·        not handling priorities
·        not taking calculated risks, lack of  “boldness, nerve, and self-confidence”
·        not asking for help or advice when needed
·        not recognizing their own weaknesses 

A pretty good instrument to measure the effectiveness of managers could be made from this list. Let me address one area: handling priorities. 

We live in workplaces where increasingly we have to do more with less. Technologies sometimes increase workload where one might think workload should decrease. Organizations downsize but the work remains. Is it any wonder that in this environment our days are filled with the busywork of staying afloat?

As a young manager I found my days fully occupied with solving problems, making decisions, communicating, and so forth. But one evening I was reading Peter Drucker’s Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices and I realized I was not doing my job. Nobody noticed and probably no one would ever notice – but I was not thinking about where I wanted to lead my part of the organization. The next day when I came to work, I asked my secretary to hold all calls unless from the top guy (and it was a guy in those days). I spent the day in my office letting the busywork pileup while I drank coffee, Dr. Peppers, and thought about what we were really about. I came up with direction, a vision of where I wanted us to go, and how we might get there. At our next meeting I bounced the ideas off my teams and they agreed. Over the next year we focused more on effective, meaningful training. With better skill sets came more success at our primary mission. Together we made an impact. 

I had not been handling my real priorities, leading and visioning. It was hard to find time at first and only got harder as I climbed the ladder. When it was impossible to take a day during my work week, I made it a Saturday. I recall after one Saturday, and subsequent divisional conversations, I presented our plan to my boss.  He liked it but was amazed, “How on earth did you find time to do this?” If you understand your priorities, you make time -- at work and in life.