May 25, 2016
When life deals you a hand you don’t like, whether it’s a management decision that’s unpalatable, a boss who is unethical, a spouse who nags you, or a meal that is uneatable, you have three, and only three, healthy options: Positive Change, Acceptance, or Leaving.
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Your first option is positive change: Do something to change what you don’t like. Take action that will effect a difference. Present a proposal that proves there’s a better way for your company to go. Let your boss know you won’t go along with his unethical behavior, or go to his manager and spill the beans. Refuse to accept your spouse’s nagging or get the two of you into counseling. Send that meal back to the kitchen or walk out of the restaurant. Just DO something.
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Sometimes positive change works and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes there are things you can’t change. Decisions you can’t affect. People you can’t influence. A spouse who won’t change. A meal you have to eat because you’re starving and don’t have time to go anywhere else. In those cases, your next healthy choice in life is to accept or embrace what you don’t like, understanding that there are some things in life we can’t change, or we’re not willing to invest the time and energy to do so.
For example, as organizational consultants, we travel a great deal. We appreciate the importance of airport security procedures, especially since 9/11. But those procedures are still a hassle we don’t like to endure. Would it be worth our time and energy to try to change them?
Obviously not. So we accept them (not always gracefully!) and we don’t complain, even while being put through the annoyance of a pat-down and body search. It would do us no good, so why object?
You may be saying, “Hey, aren’t there are some things you absolutely should never accept, even if you can’t change them?”
Of course there are. Some issues are worth fighting to the death over, both figuratively and actually. For example, James Alderson was a financial officer with a hospital in Whitefish, Montana, that was managed by Quorum Health Resources Inc. In 1993 he was dismissed from his job soon after refusing to follow the company’s cost-reporting tactics, which he considered illegal.1 He joined the U.S. government in a lawsuit against Quorum and its parent company, Columbia/HCA.
In October 2000, Quorum agreed to pay the government $95.5 million in civil penalties to settle two lawsuits that accused it of defrauding federal health care programs like Medicare. Columbia/HCA agreed to pay $745 million.2 Although it cost him his job, Alderson’s courage to speak up put the health care industry on notice that Medicare and Medicaid would not tolerate fraudulent billing.
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If you can’t or won’t apply positive change to what you don’t like, and if you can’t or won’t accept or embrace it, the only healthy option that remains is leaving. Sometimes this is your best way to go. Not every job situation is right for everyone. Life is too short to spend your precious time fighting battles you can’t win or trying to mesh personalities that won’t mesh. The relationship between employees and employers is like marriage—there are times when divorce can be therapeutic for both parties.
Our major concern is with people who, in the face of a situation they don’t like or don’t want, fail to choose one of these three healthy options. They’re known as the whiners, the moaners, the complainers, the “lipotagers” who won’t do anything constructive to resolve the source of
their disgruntlement—but will talk about it to anyone who will listen. We think of them as the “people who light up a room when they leave it..”