Pig whistling

I’ve been working with some groups recently on a personal impact workshop. It’s been a fun experience and they’ve been good groups, open and ready to take on all the stuff we threw at them. On one of the workshops I encountered a delegate who was newly promoted into quite a senior role. As a facilitator, you begin to get a bit of a sixth sense about delegates; the quality of some just strikes you and this was one of those cases. She was bright, articulate and smart – the fact that she’d just been promoted into a big role clearly spoke volumes about her abilities and her organisation clearly had confidence in her. The one thing she lacked was confidence in herself.

She was role-playing, with an actor, a scenario involving her manager: she wanted his support (by which she meant his reassurance that she was doing a good job) but he wasn’t giving it. It wasn’t that he was a bad person or unsupportive – he’d recommended her for the promotion, after all – but he was totally unable to understand or deal with the emotional needs she was describing. The other people in the group, watching her role-play, suggested that she shock her manager in some way, to force him to change his approach and give her the support she needed – the most common suggestion was for her to burst into tears. I know they were motivated by good intentions but I couldn’t help saying I thought that was a bad idea.

I was reminded of an old saying: never try to teach a pig to whistle – it never works and it annoys the pig. The fact is there was nothing particularly wrong with the manager. Of course, perhaps she – and I – might prefer it if he was a little more in tune with the emotional needs of his staff but as he was in his mid-fifties, that was unlikely to change and wasn’t the problem, anyway. The problem was that she had perfectly reasonable needs which she insisted that he meet, despite his obvious inability to do so.

My advice to her was to use her manager for the things he was good at – his technical expertise and his practical guidance on the job she was being expected to do – and to stop banging her head against a wall, expecting him to do something he was clearly incapable of doing. Better, instead, for her to focus on getting those emotional needs met elsewhere – perhaps through a coach or a mentor.

It sounds like I’m blaming her and letting her manager “off the hook” in some way but I’m not. We deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be; sometimes people don’t do what we want or don’t give us what we want. No one can change another person any more than someone else can change us – they have to want to change and sometimes they don’t want to or feel they can’t. In that case, as Victor Frankl wrote, when we cannot change our circumstances, we are forced to change ourselves.