Laura Crawshaw

Taming the Abrasive Manager


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to me that Seattle was overrun with psychotherapists—I’d have to wait until a fair number of them dropped dead before I could have any hope of opening a viable practice. I’m not the deathwatch type, and beyond this, I was (and still am) a total tourist—I lusted to explore the wider world beyond the four walls of a clinical office. So I heeded the call of the wild, purchased a ferry ticket north to Alaska, and bolted. There were jobs aplenty in the Last Frontier, and who knew what other experiences awaited?

      The guns? I encountered the guns in the course of my counseling work. The typical scenario consisted of a call from an employee for a same-day appointment because he (they were always men) ‘‘needed to talk to someone right away.’’ We took these quiet, urgent calls seriously, reshuffling our schedules for such sudden requests. I would find myself seated across from the client, who was usually withdrawn and obviously embarrassed to be sitting in a counselor’s office. My questions of ‘‘How can I help you? Could you tell me what’s going on?’’ would elicit a halting story of suffering. The suffering was inflicted by the employee’s boss, whose behavior could take many forms, such as tyrannical control or public humiliation of the employee. The variations never failed to amaze me, but the common theme was of abrasive behavior that had pushed the employee to the point of . . . what? To find the answer, I uttered the psychotherapist’s classic question:

       Counselor: And how does this make you feel?

       Employee: Like getting back at him.

       Counselor: Have you thought of how you would do that?

       Employee: Yeah. [An embarrassed silence.] With a gun.

       Counselor: Do you have a gun?

       Employee: Uh . . . yeah . . . out in my truck. That’s why I called you.

      I have a confession to make: I don’t call myself a boss whisperer in real life. I refer to myself as an executive coach, the standard term applied to coaches who work with businesspeople. I have mixed feelings about the executive coach label because it suggests that I restrict my coaching to the upper echelons of bossdom, otherwise known as the C-level: CEO, COO, CIO, CFO, and assorted other chiefs. I am distinctly uncomfortable with such an elitist conceptualization of coaching and have to restrain my potentially abrasive comments when other coaches boast that they work exclusively with top executives, as if this were some sort of badge of honor. I’m not terribly impressed with physicians who take pride in treating only the wealthy or powerful—it doesn’t make them better doctors. Bosses at every level struggle with management challenges, and to limit their access to coaching because of the outrageous fees charged by many of these C-level coaches is, I believe, unethical. Tirade over.

      Even though I don’t initially refer to my work as boss whispering, the term roughly describes what I do. Much like the horse whisperer who calms unmanageable horses, I work to calm the fears that drive abrasive bosses to trample on others’ emotions. I became a boss whisperer the same way that horse whisperers start, by carefully observing horses (or in my case, bosses) and trying to understand why they behave as they do. This requires trying to get into their heads and see the world through their eyes. This process of observing behavior in order to decipher its meaning is actually the process of empathy. Empathy doesn’t mean feeling for (sympathy)—it means feeling into, or feeling with, as in putting one’s self into the shoes (or hooves) of other beings to better understand the feelings that motivate their problematic behaviors. Using empathy, the whisperer gains insight into the abrasive behaviors and translates this insight into methods specifically designed to calm the horse (or boss) and eliminate the maladaptive behavior without the use of force or intimidation.

      Remember that my earliest lessons in suffering were taught by animals. However, my earliest lessons in reading emotions were imparted by humans and, more specifically, by my father. This should come as no surprise: if you’re the child of an auto mechanic, chances are pretty good that