As a leader, people will come to you with their problems, concerns, worries, and frustrations. While it might sound like heaven-on-earth if no one shared their concerns, issues, and problems, it likely means they have them and don’t trust you enough to tell you – which is far from a heavenly situation. We call this practice of telling others our challenges and concerns grumbling, venting, complaining, or worse. While these actions seem the same, there is a difference. And understanding the difference between venting and complaining is important.
Here's why.
What’s the Difference?
We all need to vent our concerns and frustrations. How people do it might vary. But the need to take fuzzy thoughts and clarify them with words is part of the human condition. And that is what venting is – sharing worries, concerns, and issues with someone else. It is helpful to the “venter,” and as a leader, we can feel good if people bring their issues and concerns to us. It is a sign of comfort and trust.
Complaining is something else.
Complaining is the continual or ongoing discussion of an issue, usually with blame attached and seemingly no desire to take any action.
The difference between venting and complaining is frequency and repetition.
We vent frustration. We complain when we keep talking about it, bring it up regularly, or wallow in it.
The difference between venting and complaining is significant. And leaders need to understand that difference to be most effective and successful.
What to Do
When someone comes to you with a problem or challenge, make your first goal to help the person feel heard. While they may want solutions and ideas, what they want first is for you to listen. After you have listened to understand, you can ask if they want help.
But beyond that initial response to the other person, you need to ask yourself – is this venting or complaining?
If it is venting, the listening you have already done may be all that is needed or desired by the other person.
Chances are you have had someone share concerns with you for several minutes and finished by thanking you for your help – even if you didn’t say anything! You did help by allowing them to talk out their concerns! This is an example of how we can be helpful without offering a solution or further feeding people’s concerns.
But when you recognize complaining, (based on how many times you have heard this issue before, or the level of blame being placed on others) your approach needs to change.
After initial listening, you need to kindly acknowledge that you have heard this concern before. Then help them move toward solutions. You could ask:
- "How would you like things to be different?"
- "How can I help?"
- "What have you already tried (since the earlier venting)?"
- "What might you try next time?"
In other words, complaining may lead to coaching. When people act on the coaching, the complaints will diminish or dissolve.
If the complaining continues, so should the coaching. Help them see that the complaining isn’t helpful, except to move us closer to a solution.
If no solution or improvement can be found, there is one more thing you can do.
Encourage them to let it go. At that point, everyone knows the challenge, and there are no known solutions, or none they are willing to try. In that case, additional complaining doesn’t help anyone and can drag down the energy and attitude of those involved too.
We could go into much more depth on how to do the coaching in these situations. But you will likely never get to that point without understanding the difference between venting and complaining.
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