Use Your Words

Recently, in an effort to be a better manager, I asked every member of my staff to complete an anonymous survey. The results were brutal: “Management has no idea what we need. Leadership is completely detached from us. Shelly is clueless.” (Ok, they didn’t actually say that last one. That’s what I felt I was reading.) When I formed a workgroup to help me make changes on the unit, I asked them to tell me examples of what exactly was meant by these comments. As it turns out, one of the issues was that our staff needs euipment repaired, and they are discouraged that we have not done it. 
 
How simple! Even in a climate where budgets have constraints and priorities compete for attention, fixing a blood pressure machine, for example, is easy stuff to arrange. Of course I will do everything I can to fix what can be fixed! But I haven’t been doing so, because, as invested as I am in being a good leader, I cannot intuit when a thermometer isn’t reading correctly, for example. I need them to tell me. So, my next
question is, “Why walk around feeling abandoned, frustrated, and as if the people who lead the department don’t care at all? Why don’t they just ask for what they need?”
 
I found my answer in, “Getting the Love you Want,”by Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. In Hendrix book, he talks about our tendency to imagine that people just know what we want. If they care at all, we think we  shouldn’t have to ask for it. His observation is that we come into this world with a caretaker/mother who is amazingly equipped to read our minds. We need to be fed, or held, or changed, and somehow, because she loves us, she knows exactly what to do to answer our cries. No asking necessary.  

However, Hendrix continues, we continue imagining as we transition into adults that expressing our displeasure (like the cries of an infant) should be enough to get the people who love us to “fix it.”
This imagining isn’t based in logic, and we might know that this expectation is impossible to meet, but it’s so basic, so ingrained, that we nearly cannot escape it. “If you care, you would _____, without me even asking,” is a concept we drag with us into every relationship: personal, professional, and social.
Yet, as we transition into adults, we have much more complex needs than anyone can meet via the mother/infant guessing game.
 
Just as a toddler learns to speak, largely so that he can get more specific about his demands, so must we learn to speak. We cannot continue to expect our leaders to guess what we want, trust them to imagine it, and become discouraged when we don’t get it. We cannot expect our loved ones to imagine what we need to feel beloved and become distant and forlorn when they fail. And in fact, we cannot expect our own, conscious, planning minds to create a path for living that meets our deepest desires for joy if we aren’t able to articulate exactly what those desires are. We must learn to voice our needs in something other than cries, frowns, or exasperated sighs of displeasure.
 
I am reminded of a girlfriend of mine who guided
  her young son while he was whining and starting to throw a fit about some want
  or another. “Use your words,” she said gently. Indeed.

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