Ep #416: The Culture of Complaining

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 416.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly.

Hello, my empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. I hope that the magic of December is snowing upon you and that everyone is in their high holiday spirits and that the moods are lovely and bright, just as we would want them to be this time of year. But if they’re not, we’re going to talk about the culture of complaining.

I was talking with one of my clients who has been a one-on-one client for years. She’s now an EPC, and we were talking about October, November being hard this year. Being, the fall dip just felt like it lingered on and on and on. And she said the year has felt heavy this year.

So I want you to think, when you are thinking that the year is heavy, those are your thoughts, your emotions, it’s your current experience. Just be mindful not to project how you feel onto your staff. So if the year is feeling heavy for you, self-coach. Check in with you. Why does it feel heavy for me? Am I carrying a personal burden? Is there something going on in my personal life? Is there a lot going on professionally for me? Am I carrying a lot of weight for myself this year? Am I carrying a lot of weight for others? What’s coming up for me that I think the year is heavy?

Now, if you are believing the year is heavy because other people keep saying, “Wow, it’s just been such a heavy year. There’s just so much going on. I feel really heavy this year. I feel the dip. The fall dip is just in full swing.” If you are hearing that from other people, then you can explore with others why that might be happening.

But I want to highlight something that really caught my attention. I have been coaching daily on the number of complaints. Teachers complaining, just staff, paraprofessionals, office, like people just kind of sitting around and complaining. And as I was coaching on it one day, it occurred to me, why are people complaining? Why is it allowed to complain? Why do we have the permission to complain?

Now, I’m not talking about expressing your feelings, validating how you feel, being acknowledged, being seen, being heard. That is different. And you might call it complaining when somebody comes in and they’re really stressed out and they need to be heard to regulate themselves mentally or emotionally. I’m talking about just the, “This isn’t right, and that’s not right, and this never gets done, and what are you going to do about this? And my thing isn’t working here, and so-and-so said this, and maintenance never comes on time, and technology’s been three weeks.” That kind of stuff where people are just kind of venting out and putting complaints out into the atmosphere, into the energy of your school.

So I asked my client, what is allowing this culture of complaining? Can you think back to a time when people weren’t complaining or has it always been a part of the culture at your site? And we dug in deep and she was able to nail it on the head. She said it was when the construction started. They’ve been in construction for a couple of years, and it, obviously, if any of you have lived through construction at school during a school year, remodeling, whatever is going on, you know how challenging that can be for yourself and particularly for teachers.

Teachers are organized, they’re highly efficient, they are self-independent. They get those classrooms whipped up into shape. They are beautiful. They’re like second homes in there. And when things aren’t working, when the water’s not working, or the electricity goes out, or the internet’s off, or their whiteboard doesn’t work, their Smartboard, or their tables got moved around over the break and now their room’s a big mess because somebody came in to work on the carpets or something, she noticed that was when she felt the shift in complaining.

And what was so fascinating is that I told her the reason that everyone has permission to complain is that you are in agreement with them. You are agreeing that the construction is a pain, that it’s taking forever. You’re just as frustrated. Things in your office aren’t working. And so you are in agreement. So when somebody comes in and sits down and says, this and this and this and that, and you’re like, “Yes.” It’s what we call jumping in the pool. We believe the story. We get in the deep end with them and we all swim around and everybody’s drowning in their sorrows, but nobody is on the sidelines to throw a life preserver to save you from the pain and suffering of the complaining.

If you have the thought or you have the experience that a lot of people on campus are complaining, ask yourself why that might be. What is going on in the culture of your school that allows complaining, that somehow, like, subconsciously gives it permission, condones it, agrees with it? Because when somebody comes into your office and they have a legitimate concern, you can hear them out and then what do you do? You shift the energy. You flip the dip.

This is what I taught in Flip the Fall Dip. We flip energetically the energy. So when they come in and they complain, you can listen and validate, acknowledge that must be really frustrating. I can see why this is annoying you, or I can see why it would be hard to teach under these conditions. What is it you most need right now to feel better? When you ask them that, it shifts them into checking in with themselves. Wow, what do I need right now? And what’s going to help me feel better?

Oftentimes people will say something, “I need XYZ to get fixed.” “Well, I need the whiteboard to get fixed, or I need the technology to get fixed.” Okay, great. Let’s walk through the process of making that happen, whatever the protocol is. And then you walk them through the protocol. And if they say, “Yes, I’ve done all of these things, and the reason I’m coming to you to complain is that I’m frustrated that nothing’s been done.” Great. So we need to follow up. Are you able to do that? Are you able to follow up with tech to get your things online? “I’ve already done that.” Okay. I will call them. Can you send me the documentation of the date that you entered it, the date that you followed up, just for my reference so that I can let them know that this has been going on for you for days or for weeks? But you can flip the energy by not letting people sit and stew in the complaining part.

Yes, they need to be heard. Yes, it’s important to validate their emotions and to acknowledge them. And we want to flip that dip and get them into empowerment energy. What is it you need to feel better, to feel regulated? What would feel better to you as a next step? Do you have that? Can you handle that? Or do you need me to handle that based on, if they haven’t done anything, you would say, okay, great next step is to follow up.

I want you to consider, and I know this, it feels uncomfortable to think that we are allowing a culture of complaining, but what happens is when we are dysregulated as the leader and we are not self-coaching or we are not getting support outside of our team, our staff, we agree with it subconsciously and because we’re complaining inside, we’re feeling frustrated, we’re venting. And when somebody comes in, we’re like listening to them, kind of nodding our head like, “Yeah, I hear you, I feel you. I’m in the same boat.” But if you’re both in that boat, who can rescue? Who can fix the problem? Versus acknowledging, validating them and flipping the switch into empowerment. What is it you need to feel? What can we do? What’s the next best step? How do you make this better? What would feel good today? What is your intention in telling me this? Did you just need to feel heard? Did you need something done? Do you have a question in terms of what your next steps are?

I want you to be empowered. I want you to be able to handle this on your own so that you don’t feel like you have to wait around for me to get to it. If there’s something I can do to empower you, please let me know. Our goal as leaders is to empower people, not to give them permission slips to complain. And 90% of the complaining might be valid, but it doesn’t end at complaining. That’s the beginning. The ending is, how do you want to feel? What do you think would get you there? What are the next steps? How do we overcome this obstacle so we can get you rolling so that this doesn’t have to be a concern for you anymore? Who do we have to talk to? What’s the process? What’s the protocol? What’s the communication procedure? And we don’t let people stew in the complaining portion of their expression, of their situation.

Give this a try. Contemplate if you are allowing people to come in and listen in the name of, “Well, they need to be seen and they need to be heard and I want to validate them. They work so hard.” Yes, they do. And they don’t want to feel helpless. They want to feel like they know how to solve this problem. And if they’re telling themselves, “I’m just too tired, it’s just too much. I just don’t have the bandwidth to solve this problem.” That’s okay. They can sit in the problem or we can spend five minutes figuring out what we’re going to do and then just do the thing and be done with it. Because a lot of times when teachers need something, the complaining is almost a resistance to just taking the next action step. And I’ve done it too. I watch myself do it all the time. I spend more time thinking about, complaining about, resisting than I do just doing.

So I can jump on here and record this podcast in real time as I’m getting off the phone with my client to share this valuable information with you. Or I could think about recording and then think about what we said and think about, oh, I’m going to have to, oh, there’s a new platform I got to upload the podcast on. Oh, I don’t want to have to learn that new thing. So that’s going to, now there’s an obstacle in my way of just getting on here and recording it. Oh, I should probably write out detailed notes.

No. I’m in the energy of a complaint-free culture. So I’m going to speak to it while I’m in that energy, while I’m in the feeling of empowerment. And I have to say a lot of times these are some of the highest-rated episodes where I just come on here off script and I share a specific incident with you because if it’s one person is dealing with it as a principal, I can guarantee you hundreds if not thousands of people feel the same way or are experiencing something similar because the job itself has several universal experiences, and people complaining is probably one of them.

So, give this a try. Let us know how it goes. Have a beautiful week and I’ll talk to you next week. Take great care of yourselves. Happy December.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit AngelaKellyCoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.