What a load of...

This week, climate change protesters dumped manure on TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson’s doorstep in protest at his comments denying global warming. Ordinarily, this would not provide inspiration for a blog, but I had time on my hands during a journey and I started thinking about the role I had before I was a training consultant: for six years, I dealt with complaints.

Complaint handling, for those who’ve never tried it, is the second best job in the world – after training, of course. It’s a tremendous opportunity to understand people and one of the first lessons you learn when you deal with complaints is that you’d better listen to what people say or you’re going find yourself in a lot of unnecessary trouble.

If you have a brother or a sister, at some point in your childhood you will have pretended not to hear them: what happened next will have fallen into a predictable pattern. Having realised that they’re being ignored, they shouted louder – on the assumption that you really did have something wrong with your hearing and if they could just hit the right volume, all would be well. When this failed to work, as it inevitably did, they moved to stage two and went running off to complain to mum or dad. Of course, their response was invariably to tell your brother or sister to sort it out themselves and so they moved to stage three: they hit you – which usually brought about a completely new set of problems!

So what does all this have to do with Clarkson, manure and complaints? Well, I realised when I dealt with complaints that we never grow out of that pattern of complaining. If someone complained and I rejected it, they’d repeat themselves, only louder – the letter would be longer, more strident; maybe there’d be phone calls. If that didn’t work, they’d complain to a higher authority – the MD of the company, the regulator or the media. If they still didn’t think they’d been heard, they’d move to the equivalent of violence: parading up and down outside the office with a sandwich board or dumping manure on the doorstep.

Why does this happen? Quite simply because if people ignore us, they’re not just ignoring our words, they’re denying our very existence. It really upsets us, so we fall into the same old pattern we’ve used since childhood. If you keep having the same conversation with someone, if they keep repeating the same thing over and over again, it’s because they don’t think you’ve heard them yet. Better start listening – and showing them that you’re listening – before you wake up and smell something other than the coffee…