A summer evening in a Paris pub I chatted with a friend over a glass of wine. We met for a few hours because we happened to be in the same city.
His assertive voice was softer than usual, his conversational responses slower. Something occupied his mind so I shut up and created silence. Suddenly he blurted: “I am going to divorce my wife”.
I was stunned. This divorce made no sense. I knew his wife. A nurse by profession, a buddhist, with an inner glow and an awesome dignity under pressure.
Me: “Why?”
He: “She keeps nagging me. She thinks I should stop running businesses … but I love it. I cannot live with a person who dislikes what I am doing.”
If I had not met her before, I might have taken all this as another marriage statistic. But something didn’t make sense…
It made so little sense that I somehow felt I had to sort it out.
Me: “When does she nag you to stop doing business?”
Him: “All the time!”
Me: “Every day?”
Him: “Almost every day!”
Me: “Mornings or evenings?”
Him: “What ?!”
Me: “Just answer! Mornings or evenings?”
Him: “Hm … actually …evenings…”
Me: “What happens just before she nags?”
Him: “What …!?”
Me: “Please just answer … what usually happens just before she starts nagging?”
Him: “Well … we talk.”
Me: “Talk about what? And who does the talking?”
Him: “I talk about my day in the office.”
Me: “Anything in particular?”
Him: “Well … the new factory is a pain in the a.. . My assistants in the management team behave immature. No initiative! Annoyingly stupid questions. Almost funny…”
He was about to start on a long rant and I asked him to hold his thought.
Me: “Let me summarise … you have recruited yourself a management team consisting of assistants!! I don’t know if you notice the humour in that sentence, but whatever. You come home every day and talk about your difficulties – probably telling funny stories. But recently your tone grows more frustrated. Your wife, being a nurse, has probably seen a number of men dying of heart attacks on her watch. So she recommends you to stop punishing yourself, because you seem increasingly angry and incapable of solving your management problems. Is this a fair summary?”
Him: “But I love what I do …”
Me: “Thats probably true for those guys with the heart attacks as well. From her perspective she gives you loving advise.”
Him: “I don’t need advise. She knows nothing about management.”
Me: “Well, what do you want her to do instead?”
Him: “to listen.”
Me: “So you don’t want an advisor. You want a spewing bag.”
Him: “That’s not what I would call it, but … in a sense … yes.”
Me: “Fair enough. Two questions: 1) have you told her that you want a spewing bag ? and 2) have you asked her permission to use her as a spewing bag?”
Him: “f………………..k !”
To keep a long story short, they didn’t divorce. She agreed to her clarified role as a temporary spewing bag – on the condition that he always asked for permission on a few minutes notice…
Half of his herd of ‘assistants’ transformed into a management team worth the name by simply defining their individual- and their team roles. The other half needed to be replaced.
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Our troubles are often caused not by the content of our messages, but by a lack of mutual clarity of situational roles. Without that clarity, even clear messages are misunderstood.
A cardinal question in leadership communication is: how to close the gaps between what we want, what we formulate and what is understood…