Craig Huntington

I’d just finished a speaking engagement to a terrific HOA group, and was having dinner with a couple of the seminar attendees. The presentation on communication, one of my favorites, was entitled How to Make Your Words Count, and the dinner chat was a continuation of that theme.

One of my companions shared a story about his former boss, a relationship-challenged gentleman who decided it was a good idea to have all of his employees take the DISC personal assessment. The DISC tool uses four different behavioral categories (Dominance-D, Influence-I, Steadiness-S and Conscientiousness-C) to identify an individual’s natural and adapted behaviors. While the assessment was initially created for enhanced self-awareness, today it’s often used to help evaluate job candidates by shedding light on how their personality type might fit within an organization or how an individual might perform in a certain role.

So, the boss man instructed his team to take the DISC assessment. He informed them that they would be sharing the results of their assessments in a group meeting – with the stated goal of better communication through greater understanding.

Three men walk into the CIA headquarters and ask to be hired. A man there replies, “OK, but first we have to test your loyalty.”

He says to the first man: "Here's a gun to prove your loyalty. We have your wife in the other room. Go shoot her." So this guy goes into the room, and he comes out fifteen minutes later and says: "I tried, but I just can not do it."

The next man goes in, and the same thing happens.

Then the last guy goes in, and he sees his wife sitting there. The man who is testing him is waiting to hear gunshots. Then it happens. BANG... BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, followed by tons of crashing and smashing.

Cupcake. Precious. Mama’s Boy.

As a Baby Boomer, if you wanted to tease someone who was whining or behaving in a mentally or physically wimpy manner, you picked one of those tags and slapped it on them. And you did it to help the offender recognize that they needed to toughen up, work harder, or move beyond whatever was holding them back because, well…

Life ain’t fair.

When the goin’ gets tough, the tough get goin’.

And… What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

The attitude was that in order to succeed at whatever you do, you needed to persevere through all kinds of challenges. And everyone has challenges. You are no different. You have good days and bad days. Not everyone is going to agree with you. Not everyone is going to like you. Life isn’t for cowards, so you’d better find the grit you need to survive.

Imagine it’s Black Friday. You’re on a mission to knock out a sizable chunk of your holiday shopping responsibilities. You’re moving quickly through stores, laser-focused, scoping the sale items in your field of vision so that your brain can process each durable good on a scale of likability and appropriateness for each of the family members, friends and colleagues who need gifts from you.

The big box store you’re in is vibrating. People are talking loud, moving with a purpose, and are mostly consumed with accomplishing their retail objectives. And then, you see her.

In the midst of everything that is Black Friday, a woman in her 30s is sitting on the corner of some product display, and she’s crying. Actually, her emotion is more raw and unrestrained than that; she is sobbing uncontrollably.

Here are some actual quotes from real managers at some of the nation’s largest companies:

“We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees.”

“This project is so important we can’t let things that are more important interfere with it.”

“Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule.”

Sure, we managers say some pretty dumb things on occasion. All of us do. But being a leader means that it doesn’t happen often. With that in mind, here are three times when it really pays dividends to invest some forethought before engaging with an employee: when you praise, when you apologize, and when you reprimand.