8 ways to survive among complainers

Walter Moore
4 min readAug 5, 2019

Each entrepreneur must build a truly ivory skin to calmly respond to negative attacks from others: customers or competitors. But at the same time, a permanent existence in such an atmosphere can kill anyone, even an elephant. Tolerate a negative environment is more expensive for yourself, which means that you need to seriously get to work. Especially if active skeptics and complainers are wound up in your team. You can find the strength in a patient relationship with clients, but malicious vibes in your team need to be eliminated. Whining and skepticism are extremely sticky, and one single complainer can infect the entire team. The consequences of this disease are very deplorable: the desire to work, the desire for innovation, the desire to surpass the competitors, the creative impulses disappear. The result — the collapse of the enterprise and the ruin of the business owner. So how to survive in such conditions, how to minimize the negative impact?

1. Keep yourself in control

Failures happen in every business. Every entrepreneur sooner or later once or from time to time faces losses, pointed out by Michael Giannulis. This is very distressing. But keep your grief to yourself. Do not show others, and even more so your subordinates, that you are upset and have lost heart. Even if you have neither the strength nor the desire to do business, at least find within yourself the resources not to spread about it. Then the team, inspired by your example, will be able to cope with their feelings and begin to effectively deal with the consequences of the crisis, instead of wailing after you.

2. Take advantage of the negative aspects

In any situation, look for something good and imagine it for your good. Rejected goods immediately before shipping, and you break the deadline? Rejoice out loud that you noticed this before sending a batch of products to the customer. Such alternative thinking is highly contagious. And soon each of your subordinates will draw conclusions that are right for themselves and will cease to produce negativity.

3. Transfer responsibility back to the complainant and demand specific decisions from him

Some people are just too much to criticize. Invite them to voice an alternative opinion, their vision of overcoming the crisis, let them offer their solution to the problem. Turn the conversation into a constructive channel.You can use JCPenney Credit Card Login to get a proper credit card according to your need.

4. Do not make excuses for bad consequences

Many complainants believe that they simply have to explain why it happened, and not otherwise. Your task is to convey to them the idea that you are of little interest in the reasons for failure (if they, of course, do not belong to “insurmountable circumstances”), but only what a person is willing to do to correct the current situation. Never make concessions. Once you give up the slack, and people stop trying, knowing that they can justify at any time. Make sure that the complainants are removed from your compensation system; they should know that excuses do not alleviate failures.

5. Do not participate in the debate.

If you feel that at the moment you do not have the strength to turn the conversation with the complainant in the right direction, that you cannot set a person up for positive, postpone the conversation until next time. The worst thing is not to calculate your strength and enter into a dispute, because the dispute can turn into a quarrel and, as a result, a break in relations. Even if you want to part with an employee, you always need to do this in a relaxed atmosphere, eliminating the option “dismissal on emotions.”

6. Dismiss

This is the most unpopular method to deal with the distributors of negative emotions, but if other methods do not help, or endure, or dismiss. Health is more expensive. And yours, and your team.

7. Remember, everyone makes mistakes sometimes

We are all human, all of us tend to make mistakes. You, as a leader, must remember that everyone has the right to make a mistake. Therefore, look not at the fact of “puncture”, but at how a person experiences this event. Some draw conclusions, work to correct the situation, and try their best to prevent such missteps in the future, while others repent, “zero out” and continue to do nothing until the next mistake. The former must be understood, the latter must be fought.

8. Build a personal invisible wall from negativity from confidence and desire to work

There is no escape from negative vibes. As long as we live in society and interact with people, they will still be. Learn to ignore skeptics and complainers. Think about your goal and go to it, no matter what. Gradually, you will begin to see only the good and treat the bad philosophically. In the end, only the result matters.

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