Читать книгу Taming the Abrasive Manager - Laura Crawshaw - Страница 18

Even though I don’t initially refer to my work as boss whispering, the term roughly describes what I do. Much like the horse whisperer who calms unmanageable horses, I work to calm the fears that drive abrasive bosses to trample on others’ emotions. I became a boss whisperer the same way that horse whisperers start, by carefully observing horses (or in my case, bosses) and trying to understand why they behave as they do. This requires trying to get into their heads and see the world through their eyes. This process of observing behavior in order to decipher its meaning is actually the process of empathy. Empathy doesn’t mean feeling for (sympathy)—it means feeling into, or feeling with, as in putting one’s self into the shoes (or hooves) of other beings to better understand the feelings that motivate their problematic behaviors. Using empathy, the whisperer gains insight into the abrasive behaviors and translates this insight into methods specifically designed to calm the horse (or boss) and eliminate the maladaptive behavior without the use of force or intimidation.

Calm the fears that drive abrasive bosses? Because of their intimidating, aggressive styles, it can be a stretch to believe that these fear-inspiring individuals are themselves driven by fear. I’ll discuss this concept in greater detail in Chapter Four, but for now I want to emphasize that emotions drive, or move, behavior: the word emotion is derived from the Latin emovere (‘‘to move out’’). To understand behavior, one must seek to understand the underlying emotions that move (motivate) the behavior. I call this reading emotions—putting yourself in another’s shoes (in other words, using empathy) to decipher the fears motivating problematic behavior. Horse whisperers spend a lot of time hanging around the ol’ corral, observing what motivates horses to do what they do. As a subordinate, peer, executive, and boss whisperer, I’ve spent a lot of time in corporate corrals observing boss behavior. But my training in whispering started long before those years spent with bosses—I’d been reading emotions since I was knee-high to a psychiatrist.