There’s a new guy in my office who until recently was sharing my cubicle space. Ever since he arrived a couple months ago he’s been incredibly negative and cynical. At first I thought he was just cranky after moving here from overseas, and having to buy a house and get his furniture moved here and pick up his car at the harbor and get his kids registered for school and all those little details (well, actually, pretty big details). But he’s done that stuff and he’s still just as bad…worse, actually, as now he’s complaining about work, too, and has started talking politics (more on that another day). Last week he moved out of our shared space and I was happy to have his negative vibes go away, but he ended up moving out of our little bullpen and into a desk right on the other side of the cubicle wall from me. So yeah, he’s actually in closer proximity to me now than he was before. And that’s just not a good thing.
A negative atmosphere will absolutely kill the creative spirit in your organization. People who spend all their time focused on negative things don’t have time to focus on productive stuff, like, say, doing creative work. Too much of their brainpower gets focused on what’s wrong, and not enough is used to develop new ideas. It’s as if, instead of driving down a highway toward their destination, they’re driving down an old dirt road in a different direction, with no real interest in getting anywhere special. You can’t afford that; as a business leader, you need your Creatives focused on doing their jobs to the best of their ability.
It’s not just a matter of their own reduced creativity and productivity. One individual can poison your working environment. So what do you do if you have a perpetually negative person, especially if you’re starting to see the eye-rolling and hear the snide remarks about them from co-workers? One popular idea is to try to change their attitude by drawing out positive contributions from them, asking them directly for ideas in meetings and trying to get them to offer up something worthwhile. This can have a temporary effect…they’ll answer direct questions but as soon as you’re done with them they’ll go back to their old ways. A better option is to get with them one-on-one, let them know what kind of effect they’re having, and try to discover the root of the problem. It could be they have no idea they’re doing it, and by raising it with them in a private, non-confrontational way you might get them to think about it and consciously try to change. It could just be that their personality is negative by default, and nothing you can do will change it…in that case, you’re either going to have to live with it or let them go, your choice. Or it might be that there’s a major problem in their life – maybe the subject of their negative remarks, or maybe something else they’re trying to keep private – and they can use some help addressing it. This last point is where real leadership comes into play; you really need to take care of your people, and sometimes the things that affect their work life the most are outside of the job entirely, so you may have to do some careful digging. If this is the case, and there’s something else going on that is leading to their negativity, then you’ll be doing them and yourself a great service by figuring out what that is.
As you watch for problems in your employees be sure to watch for them in yourself, too. As a leader, you will set the tone for your firm. It’s easy to find plenty of things to complain about, but that doesn’t mean you should. Instead, try to deal with problems discreetly without broadcasting them to everyone. If you find yourself getting upset, go off by yourself to think about it and calm down. As for me, I go run a few miles and try to work things out in my head. Lots of people rely on negativity as the primary basis for conversation (what someone once called the “ain’t it awful” syndrome). Don’t be that person.
None of this is to say there’s never a time to complain, or to suggest you should be some kind of Pollyanna who smiles artificially all the time and then goes home and kicks the dog out of frustration. There is a time and a place for complaining or for voicing your concerns about something, but it shouldn’t be constant, as it is with my co-worker. If you find yourself or an employee only saying negative things and never anything positive, then you have a problem that needs to be addressed. Learn to manage your negative feelings and deal with them in a way that doesn’t hurt your working environment.
Creatives need to be able to think. They need their minds open to new possibilities and they need to be able to focus on what can be done rather than on what can’t or on what isn’t working right. That’s tough to do if they or someone around them is consistently polluting the creative air with complaint after complaint after complaint.
Or am I complaining too much about this?
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