The Blind Side

An apt title for this piece and an homage to Sandra Bullock's Academy Award for her part in a lovely movie. The Blind Side I am referring to is the one where managers are dealing with an employee who cannot seem to follow certain simple instructions/requests. These can be rules or protocols that are necessary for smooth office efficiency or more detailed protocols that are usually followed, but are now lagging or being forgotten. I am now going to share my worst/best moment as a manager.

I once had a counselor working for me who I had known for several years and got along with grandly. My managerial style was very informal and more of a collegial supporting rather than a "I'm the boss so do it" approach. Being in a psychotherapeutic milieu with recovering addicts made for a very different management atmosphere and allowed a much more "emotions heavy" tone between workers than one would normally see in a corporate setting. We dealt with patients feelings all day and we openly expressed our emotions to each other all day every day---it was necessary to keep your sanity in that kind of milieu. It was a very "in the mud with each other" atmosphere and we all accepted that.

One week in our regular patient staffing, I had asked this counselor to get one of his patients to complete a task necessary to move that patient toward graduating the program. He assured me he would. The next week it was not done. I repeated the importance of getting this task finished and I was again assured it would be done the next day. The next day I checked back with him and the counselor had not talked to the patient. "You realize we are just stuck here until this is done right?" I said to the nodding counselor, "Get it done by tomorrow." I was losing my temper for the first time in my managerial career and my voice reflected it. The next day at staffing I waited until the very end to ask the counselor the big question "Is it done?" expecting him to say yes and have all the rest of the staff cheer that the whole thing was finally over. Staffing ends, I ask the question, I get silence. "Let's meet in my office," I say calmly, but furious inside. It was so simple a task that I was furious that it had repeatedly not been done. We got to my office and I am not proud of myself in the least. I yelled at the top of my voice, "What the heck is wrong with you!?" I repeated this line four times in the same volume. I continued. "I ask you a simple request for two weeks now and you cannot get it done?" "What can I do here to get you to do what you say you will do?" I have never before or since yelled at an employee and I was actually yelling. I then blurted out a line before it was ever used in a movie showing my absolute desperation in the moment, "Help me here....what can I do....help me help YOU!" (I am sure some writer of Jerry Maguire overheard this exchange, but I cannot prove it) It felt very clever in the moment and true to my emotion. I fell into my chair, frustrated at the situation and embarrassed by my outburst. He knew I had never yelled at anyone before and we avoided eye contact. I apologized. "I'm sorry, I just don't know what to do and don't know how something this trivial has turned into something this big between us." We both stared at the floor for a while.

At this point, something amazing happened. He looked up at me and said, "I know...I know what happened." There were tears in his eyes. "I have been a counselor for fifteen years working with adolescents and having to deal with their anger and rebellion. I thought working with adults would be easier because they were less rebellious. When I felt resistance from my patient to get this task done, I buckled. I realize now that I made a decision not to push this guy to get his work done because I am tired of it, tired of it all!" His voice flared in anger. "I have done this stuff all my life, pushing and pushing people to do what is right, but being pushed back by them in defiance...I'm just sick of it!" The tears flowed more easily as his face got redder and his voice both angry and dejected. He looked at me straight in the eyes, "I'm just sick of it, Kevin, I can't do this anymore."

I was watching a huge awakening before my very eyes. We sat there together silent, both aware of the magnitude of what had just transpired. He continued, "I have money, I am just doing this to keep in the field, but I don't want to do it anymore." He stood up, we hugged in a long embrace, and he walked out. I sat back down stunned at what had just happened.

The next day, he came into my office. I apologized for my outburst again and he said, "No, no it was good that you did it. It was what I needed to jar me out of my head. I sat there asking myself, 'why', 'what is wrong with me'?" He told me that after a night of thinking it over he was resigning, but would stay until I got someone hired to replace him. He realized that he hated what he was doing after 15 years and wanted to do something else---anything else. Before he stood up to leave he said, "You know I would not have realized what I did if you hadn't yelled like you did." I still felt bad about it.

So there we are, my worst/best moment as a manager. What did I take from the experience? I realize there is a blind side in everyone, but as a manager we wish it were left at home from 9-5. As managers though, we have to deal with these blind sides in our employees from time to time. They can take the form of something simple as gum smacking or incessant pencil tapping, or move into more problematic areas such as repeatedly doing or missing something that disrupts the work day. Whenever an employee repeatedly makes the exact same mistake over and over again managers often scratch their head as to why this is happening.

I have one client who cannot get his employees to stop overbooking his morning appointments. It gets better for a week or so and then BAM overbooked again and repeatedly. Nothing seemed to get through to the office assistant for long. It is in these cases that managers need to know they are dealing with a "blind side" of an employee. Their subconscious takes over for some reason and rules/protocols are totally forgotten. Of course one has to rule out overt sabotage and the cases where the task is beyond the employee's skill set, but once those are ruled out we are back to the "blind side".

Interestingly, after interviewing the assistant, I was able to glean that the problem was her inability to say no to an angry tone of voice over the phone. She would schedule people efficiently until someone got angry at not getting an immediate appointment and raised their voice over the phone. As this happens all too frequently these days, she would invariably jam the person into the over crowded schedule anyway rather than stand her ground and schedule it the next day. The angry tone on the phone in the moment shut off her rational thinking, and she did anything she could to appease the person resulting in repeated schedule overbookings and anger from her boss. Talking about this in a collaborative, problem solving manner got the underlying blind side out into the light allowing a solution to be found for a seemingly inexplicable situation. Our solution was to have her transfer the angry person to her manager immediately so that she was taken out of the loop and her manager could handle it because she had no problem holding a line with angry people. Work problem solved.

Obviously in my own example, I was dealing with a seasoned therapist whose whole life was dedicated to searching out and explaining people's unconscious material, so his blind side was handed to me on a silver platter. Thank heaven for that because I had no idea why such a simple task was not getting done. My point here is that sometimes, even in the workplace, an employee's psychological material can get in the way of getting their job done effectively, and the only way around it is THROUGH it. Psychological exploration is the only way to get a grip on our blind sides. Thank heaven for coaches!