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I was living in Virginia. My former wife was a bank branch manager, and I was starting up my company. One night, she came home from work later than usual. She had a scowl on her face as she slammed the door and went upstairs without saying anything. I followed her into the bedroom. “I guess the meeting didn’t go very well,” I offered. She threw her purse into a chair. “Mike talked non-stop for three and a half hours. He went over every single goal, what each of us has done, what we haven’t done, what we should be doing, why we should be doing it. He went on and on, one product after another. As if we don’t know all this! We just sat there in silence while he wasted our time. In three and a half hours I could have been out selling, but I had to sit there and listen to him talking to us as if we were a bunch of idiots. He does this every week, every Wednesday afternoon. Does he think this motivates us? He’s clueless! I’m motivated all right! To find another job!” Seeing her this unhappy distressed me. I know how hard it is to work for a difficult boss. If you’re not looking for a new job, you have to figure out a way to make the best of your situation. It was my business to advise people in organizations. Some ideas had started to form in my mind, and I said, “You know, there are ways to handle this guy.” She turned and looked at me with a puzzled expression on her face. I explained, “Once a week, he calls these meetings that waste your time. There’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t skip the meeting, so the trick is to make those three and a half hours count for something. If he’s not saying anything you want to hear, there are several productive things you can do.” Before I could continue, she shouted at me: “Damn it, I don’t want your advice! Can’t you see that what I need is for you to listen to me?” Her reaction took me by surprise. I was just trying to help, to give her the benefit of my experience, and now she was angry with me! I didn’t know what to say. But then I thought, she’s right. I’m actually a good listener when I try to be. Why didn’t I do that, instead of giving her advice? It occurred to me that I had made this mistake several times before. “Honey, you’re right,” I said and put my arms around her. “You’ve had a tough day. It must be frustrating to have to put up with this, knowing that next week he’s going to complain about sales again, totally oblivious to the fact that he wasted 20% of the limited time you have to actually work on sales.” She softened and looked at me with an amused smile. “That’s much better.” This dramatic incident is forever etched in my memory. It was the first of many valuable lessons I would learn about encouraging people.
Article Source: http://www.articledestination.com
Dennis E. Coates is CEO of Performance Support Systems, author of MindFrames, a brain-based personality assessment system (www.initforlife.com) and co-founder of the Train-to-Ingrain alliance (www.train-to-ingrain.com, info@train-to-ingrain.com, 800-488-6463), which delivers a reinforcement-centered approach to learning and development that achieves permanent, measurable improvements in workplace behavior and positive impacts on business results.
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