Enterprising Leadership

If you are like most of us, anything going on but what you want, warrants a complaint. Not an action-oriented, let’s get this solved kind of complaint, but your everyday run-of-the-mill mindless kind of complaining that leads nowhere (except to more negative thinking).

Jon Gordon, author of The No Complaining Rule, says there are two main reasons why we complain: (1) because we are fearful and feel helpless and two, because it has become a habit. He urges us to outgrow the complaining habit. He cites a Gallup poll that finds that negativity costs companies nearly $300 billion each year.

“In life,” Gordon writes, “you have a choice between two roads. The positive road and the negative road. The positive road will lead to enhanced health, happiness, and success and the negative road will lead to misery, anger, and failure. Since your bus can’t be on two roads at the same time, you must decide which road you want to be on. And wen you complain you travel down the negative road.”

“In life,” Gordon writes, “you have a choice between two roads. The positive road and the negative road. The positive road will lead to enhanced health, happiness, and success and the negative road will lead to misery, anger, and failure. Since your bus can’t be on two roads at the same time, you must decide which road you want to be on. And when you complain you travel down the negative road.”

As former chronic complainer, Gordon effectively delivers his message through a story. The No Complaining Rule doesn’t rule out complaining – it requires that it be constructive.

Employees are not allowed to mindlessly complain to their coworkers. If they have a problem or complaint about their job, their company, their customer, or anything else, they are encouraged to bring the issue to their manager or someone who is in a position to address the complaint. However, the employees must share one or two possible solutions to their complaint as well.

Gordon explains how do develop a positive culture by creating a culture where negativity can’t breed, grow, and survive. A crucial key is to all this is to focus on gratitude. “Research shows that when we count three blessings a day, we get a measurable boost in happiness that uplifts and energizes us. It’s also physiologically impossible to be stressed and thankful at the same time. Two thoughts cannot occupy our mind at the same time. If you are focusing on gratitude, you can’t be negative. You can also energize and engage your coworkers by letting them know you are grateful for them and their work.”

Master choreographer Twyla Tharpe has said that you practice while you perform. Or to put it another way, learning while you work. Professor Michael Fullan wrote in The Six Secrets of Change that “consistency and innovation must go together, and you can achieve them through organized learning in context.” It’s “the integration of the precision needed for consistent performance (using what we already know) with the new learning required for continuous improvement.”

This requires a thorough understanding is what you are doing and the critical tasks that make that happen. By first nailing down the “common practices that work so that you can get consistent results” you are “freeing up energy for working on innovative practices that get even greater results.”

He writes that at Toyota, where every manager is a teacher first, learning is the job. It is a culture where people learn from experience. Through performance we learn what works and what does not. “In Toyota’s culture, as in all cultures where learning is the work, the trainer is always responsible for the student’s success; if the student struggles, the trainer knows it is time to change the approach….Learning on the job is explicit, purposeful, and ubiquitous in these cultures.”

It is our job to create a learning culture where what we know is diligently and consistently applied, while we are diligently and consistently seeking at the same time, how to get better at what we do. As continuous learning is critical to leadership success, these concepts have applications in our personal lives as well. (This is the subject of Crucibles of Leadership, a great book by Robert Thomas.) Leading and learning are inextricably linked.