The Case of the Emphatic Employees. 

Emotion clouded her judgement. Once she got clear, she knew exactly what to do.

Marion was angry. The volunteers she had placed in the reserves department were not received well. The employees were rude and unhelpful.  How could she get the employees to accept these volunteers?

Marion was an executive at a large municipal library.  She attended a workshop I was conducting for volunteer coordinators — one of her responsibilities.  She presented this case. Then I led her through a brief strategic analysis.

Jesi:  What happened?

Client: I placed some volunteers in a department in the library.  The employees ignore them — they don’t give them tasks to do. They don’t even talk to them.

J: What was the objective for placing volunteers..

C: The library has a policy of encouraging volunteerism.

J: What is the objective the library wants to serve? 

C: We want the citizens to have a sense of ownership in their library, 

J: How does that serve the library’s goals? 

C: I’m not sure 

J: Maybe it’s that you will have friends on your side when the library budget comes up before the city council. 

C: that’s probably it, yes.

J: Now why do you think the employees are resisting 

C: I think it’s a union thing 

J: Afraid of losing their jobs?

C: Yeah, I think that’s it. 

J:  is it indeed a threat to their jobs? 

C: No. Not at all.

J: What is it you want to accomplish here? 

C: I want the employees to accept the volunteers.

J: Well, we have a pretty good picture of what’s going on and why.

I now led her in a clarity and insight exercise based upon this analysis. 

She immediately concluded, “I know what to do. I’m going to yank the volunteers out of there and put them in a different department. if these employees want help, I’ll give them volunteers but it will be on my terms. 

Then she paused for a moment and reflected,  saying,  “actually that’s a good solution. I only have to place volunteers somewhere. It doesn’t matter which department it gets.” 

Marianne was quite satisfied with that result—and her anger was gone!

Conclusion

While there are several points to learn here, for now I’ll focus on two.

1. Why didn’t she see the solution at first?  Has that happened to you?  When have emotions clouded your judgement?
2. Looking at the situation differently, her emotions changed, too. 

Start	Employees resist help.	Marion is angry
5 mins later	Employees resist help.	Marion not angry

What do you think about that?  Where did the anger go? Let’s look at what happened with another chart:

Start	She thinks the employees are preventing her objective	Marion is angry
5 mins later	She knows how to achieve her objective anyway.	Marion not angry

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When Marion saw how to achieve her objective, she also realized that the employees were not getting in her way. Then her anger abated. There’s an interesting guideline here. When we change our thinking, our feelings can also change. This can be really helpful. In the next post, we’ll see how this works with anxiety.

We can change our feelings by changing our thoughts