setting the overton window of complaint
There are parts of the work your team does that are hard. They probably require real emotional labor in addition to technical chops and smart thinking. Often these hard things sit at some meta-level of your work - it’s not the direct provision of your service or creation of your product.
In start-ups, non-profit or for-profit, Dealing with Change is one of these hard things. If you’re surviving as a start up, it’s likely due at least in part to big and rapid change you’re undertaking. Change is hard; unpredictability is hard. You can feel like you’re in the bewildering swamp of learning, over and over, never getting to enjoy the clear plateau of mastery.
But if choosing and weathering change is part of your competitive advantage, you shouldn’t complain about change. In fact, you should champion change. You should lick your chops when you see some change become available.
This one is often unpopular: you shouldn’t let your people complain about change either.
It’s way easier for a founder to adopt this attitude than others on the team. A founder often has financial and psychological incentives (equity and ego) that deepen her appetite for the challenging stuff that leads to success. A new employee or someone early in their career may have a variety of other reasonable considerations that sit alongside of or in front of This Organization Achieving Its Greatest Success. Those considerations can make the pain of change more acute and the prospect of success less compelling. It can feel like the juice ain’t worth the squeeze. Or like the short-term relief of complaining / venting / whining is a safe and worthwhile thing to permit oneself.
Two ways to preclude the complaints and normalize a difficult thing your team needs to excel at:
Set a cultural rule against complaining about that hard, essential thing. Enlist your leaders to (warmly) enforce the rule with modeling and reminders.
Tell the simple story over and over and over again about how your excellence at the hard, essential thing got you here and will carry you forward.
-eric
