Francis Wade | Thin-skinned staff: From insults to inspiration

Your employees are incredibly fickle. The slightest hint of bad news turns into a full-blown rumour, fuelled by WhatsApp messages.

You see all this as terribly unproductive, but your prior interventions to ‘fix’ issues seemed to go wasted. As soon as you tackle a popular complaint, another fresh one pops up to replace it.

Consider your efforts to be ineffective because they only address symptoms, rather than their causes. Here are three better ways to rethink the issue of thin-skinned staff.

In the aftermath of a hurricane, it’s not uncommon to witness acts of everyday heroism. In the face of the calamity, neighbours who refused to talk to each other forget they were recently at war. Now, given the shared challenge at hand, they must join together to get through a life-threatening disruption.

But can this kind of extra energy be released at work without a disaster occurring?

To explain how to do so, let’s examine one of the strong influences of human behaviour – the future. When people have something big to look forward to, they act differently. They just can’t help it.

The problem is that most employees in your company probably have become jaded. All they expect from the future are further disappointments and added discomforts.

They are super-sensitive, turning every error into a slight … personally targeted at them.

Imagine for a moment that this obsession with the future is a feature, not a bug. How? Their reactions show that they care about the future, so maybe there’s a way to build on this tendency.

The urgent future

The ability to envision a return to normalcy is why people bounce back after a hurricane within a short space of time.

This imagined future gives them something to look forward to. It uplifts and inspires them even when facing a tremendous loss. As they survey the wreckage, they help others find hope.

As such, they move themselves out of comfort zones, take risks, overcome historical biases, forgive debtors, sacrifice time and donate money. In other words, they dig into their hidden bank of discretionary resources to spend untapped treasure.

You, as their employer, are amazed. Why? These are the same staff members who nearly went on strike because the cafeteria lunches were low on quality and quantity.

Instead of dismissing your people as unsolvable mysteries, think of their wider humanity. As Frederik Nietsche said: “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

One way to offer staff a big ‘why’ is to craft a joint future, separate from the default.

The destination

Most employees go through the motions, more concerned about their creature comforts and conveniences than anything else. In response, many managers become afraid to ask for too much. They habitually ask for less and less.

But the fact is, they simply aren’t asking for enough.

Imagine a manager who asks his staff ‘Are you okay?’ each day. Eventually, someone gets the courage to say ‘No, I’m not’.

The manager asks why, then fixes the problem, but continues to ask ‘Are you okay?’ the next day.

Now consider a dramatic alternative.

A manager meets with her staff to create a picture of the department’s future – an invented future that goes well beyond business-as-usual. This joint aspiration acts as a win-win for all concerned. In fact, it’s so big, it instantly repels the few who are the most resistant.

But it’s exactly the kind of purpose your best employees want to be part of. It’s as if you had a hurricane. As Nietzsche implied, you now have a ‘why’ that’s worth fighting for.

After a violent storm, in the midst of tragedy, people become inspired to take extraordinary actions, even when they cause personal discomfort. This phenomenon was recorded by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. He observed that those who found a ‘why’ survived concentration camps. But that’s not all. He said: Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish ... Such a tension is inherent in the human being.

We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfil … What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

Unfortunately, putting purpose over comfort is not taught in classrooms. But the idea does offer you, a manager, a way to inspire and engage.

Francis Wade is a management consultant and author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity. To search past columns on productivity, strategy and business processes, or give feedback, email: columns@fwconsulting.com