Recently my niece, Dr Rebecca Nesbit, was interviewed by the BBC and quoted in an article entitled Smart approach to house spider survey.  Rebecca has been working with her colleagues at the Society of Biology to design and launch a new recording scheme to capture information about the UK’s house spider population.  I am getting used to Rebecca’s presence in the media – interviews on the radio, visits to the House of Commons and so on.  These are moments of quiet celebration for me – I love it that Rebecca is doing work which reflects her passion for all things natural and environmental…

…Except that Ella Davies and her fellow journalists at the BBC misspelt Rebecca’s name throughout the article (***sigh***).  Let me tell you, if your name is Nesbit (with one ‘t’) this is a familiar and wearisome mistake.  I try not to judge and still, isn’t the first rule of journalism that you check your facts?  It seemed to me to be a sloppy mistake.

It soon became clear to me that I was caught in a pattern of thinking that I see from time to time in my clients, especially in relation to the boss or “powers that be”.  It’s a pattern that’s stimulated when my clients, as employees, have something on their agenda and are not getting the response they hope for from their boss.  The pattern goes something like this:

*An employee wants something that is deeply personal to them and related to their work;
*The employee has an expectation and may or may not make a request of their boss with the aim of realising their hopes;
*When the boss doesn’t do what the employee expects, the employee invests time and energy in thinking about what the boss should do and how much the boss has failed them – but this doesn’t bring them any closer to realising their dreams.

I wonder, do you recognise yourself in this at all?  Perhaps you are seeking a promotion or a pay-rise and you feel frustrated that it hasn’t been forthcoming.  Perhaps you’d like your boss to take account of your preferences – to better understand how you like to work – and you are outraged by your boss’s lack of sensory acuity;  his or her complete failure to read the signals you are giving that the way you’re being treated isn’t working for you.  Perhaps there’s a key project coming up in the business and you hope you’ll be nominated to take part because you know you have the skills and it’s something to do and your boss ought to know to put your name forward.

Reflecting on the many examples I see of this pattern, I was also reminded of a colleague (let’s call him John), years ago, who wanted a promotion which was slow to materialise.  His response was the opposite of this wait-and-grumble approach.  John started by asking for a meeting with his boss, and used the meeting to express his desire for a promotion and to ask what he would need to do to be eligible for the promotion.  When he listened to everything that his boss told him he realised that the boss was essentially saying, “you need to become more like me”.  John was quiet, thoughtful, purposeful and methodical – unlikely to become the kind of outgoing, alpha male he saw in his boss.

This is the kind of meeting that can stimulate the pattern of thinking described above;  John could have fallen into the pattern of quietly grumbling about how his boss should be different.  He didn’t.  He started to gather information about the way promotions happened inside his organisation and about those people whom his boss had promoted in recent years.  This confirmed his view that he was unlikely to get his desired promotion in his current job and maybe even his current organisation.  He took the view that whilst his boss’s feedback suggested he didn’t have it in him to reach the level of seniority he aspired to, he had faith in his potential to succeed in his own way.  He set out to find an organisation which was better able to recognise his skills and he did, rising steadily in line with his aspirations.

John succeeded because he was willing to examine the realities of his employing organisation rather than to get stuck in a pattern of thinking that things ought to be different and doing nothing himself.  In doing so, he stood firmly in the energy of his own needs and allowed that his original strategy for meeting his needs might not work.  Rather than looking to his boss for the solution, he took responsibility himself.  As one of my coaching colleagues often puts it, you can’t change the others, you can only change yourself.

And in case you’re wondering, the photo of the spider is my own, from my recent stay in the beautiful Oxon Hoath.  Oh!  And I’ve just dropped a line to the BBC via their ‘contact us’ form and highlighted the spelling error in their article and asked if they would be willing to correct it.  If they change it, that’s all for the good.  If they don’t, I will leave their mistake with them – sloppy or not!