How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

Focus on finding solutions, not on blame.
Criticism is one of the surest
ways of triggering a deep defensive reaction. So if you actually need to
resolve a situation 
right now
, the better immediate strategy is to focus on
solutions. (Serious consequences can come later, if needed.)
Armed with that attitude, you can then deploy the resilience tips from the past
couple of chapters to help move everyone forward.
George is the CEO of a large private-label clothing manufacturer, and he
swears by this approach when dealing with other people’s screw-ups. One day
he discovered a long-running fraud at the staff restaurant. Tens of thousands of
dollars had been stolen over several months. It was a huge breach of trust for a
company with a generally friendly culture, and all his senior colleagues were
upset. After the perpetrator had been dealt with, some executives directed their
anger at the finance team. “The fraud should have been picked up way earlier
than it was,” George says, “because the finance team should have been
conducting audits. One of my colleagues was in full-on accusation mode, asking
them, ‘Why didn’t you do this or that?’ The questions weren’t entirely invalid.
But the finance guys were already feeling bad, so shouting didn’t help.”
In fact, with everyone on high alert, there was predictably little clear thinking
taking place. “It was a mud-slinging match,” he recalls, “and it wasn’t getting us
any closer to knowing what to do next. The only solution people came up with
was to close the cafeteria permanently.” This is a classic example of the knee-
jerk, black-and-white thinking that happens when people’s brains are in
defensive mode and their deliberate system isn’t fully engaged. Luckily, George
knew a little about the way that people’s brains react when they’re feeling
threatened. “So I was as furious as anyone, but I knew there was just no point
trying to resolve the situation in that way.”
George called a halt and adopted a different strategy. He deployed several of
the resilience tips I’ve mentioned in this part of the book, starting with
distancing. “When I personally have to deal with difficult things, I like to step
outside the situation and look at it from the outside in,” he says. “I imagine a

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situation where someone else is the CEO of the company, and ask myself what I
would advise 
them.
So I encouraged my staff to play that abstraction game, too. I
asked them, ‘What will we consider important when we’re looking back on this,
in five years?’
” Then he encouraged them to let go of sunk costs. “I often say
‘we are where we are’ when something bad has happened. It’s a basic phrase to
remind us to stop looking backward, to get beyond blame, and look forward
instead.” And he asked them to recall crucible moments the company had
previously faced. “I reminded them that when this or that bad thing happened in
the past, we got through it. We’re more resilient than we think.”
Once his colleagues were calmer, he asked them another rewarding question:
“What can we learn from this?” he wondered out loud, “and what should we do
as a result?” Finally, once they were ready to get into detailed problem solving,
he channeled some of the advice from 
Chapter 13
, framing the task with a
positive question to help them continue to think productively. “What’s the ideal
outcome we want to create?” he asked. “Those questions caused us to raise our
game on risk management considerably,” George says, “to the point that we
went on to fix the issue so it never happens again.”
So next time you’re dealing with a crisis that’s not of your own making—or
even one that 
is
—try asking these sorts of questions to lower the state of alert in
everyone’s brain and allow you to get to a solution: