Supportive Communication

            There is a growing problem in my organization throughout the operations department amongst some of the newer employees which have been hired to take over the positions of the “baby boomer generation”, the employees which are soon to be retiring. There is a huge difference in the way that people communicate at work and I definitely think that supportive communication is necessary with this blend of younger and older generation of workers. It needs to be said that we no longer live in an era where we can just attack someone personally and hope that they get better at their job. There are many techniques to be a successful manager or leader and improve a work environment. We have to understand that times have changed and we are no longer in the 70’s or 80’s when many of the people who are retiring now started working.

            To understand supportive communication we need to understand the difference between coaching and counseling, these are two very different techniques which need to be used when the timing is right. Coaching is a situation where managers must pass along advice and information and counseling is used when trying to correct a deficiency like attitudes at work (Whetton and Cameron pg.245). Many times where I work at it seems that counseling and coaching are blended together, this type of behavior from an employer or manager creates negative moral and employees begin to feel unappreciated at work. I have seen many times where an accident at work is punished in the same manner as someone who constantly shows up late to work. This is not a fair way to punish a good employee who had an accident, I feel like it is an old fashioned outlook on handling employees and used more like a scare tactic.

            Another factor which I find that many of the younger and newer employees are having issues with is how they are approached by some of the senior employees. I think that many of the senior employees need to approach subordinates by acknowledging their true feelings and making sure that their thoughts are communicated authentically (Whetton and Cameron pg. 265). It is obvious that many times senior employees will act out how they are feeling in destructive ways, it seems that they are much more confrontational and place labels on the individual.

The senior employees will say things at work like “you are doing it wrong” or “you are incompetent”, this is not the right way to handle a situation. This type of behavior is an evaluative type of communication where an employee places judgement on a direct individual. As stated in our text “supportive communication is descriptive not evaluative” (Wheton and Cameron pg.248), the better way to handle conflict like this would be in a descriptive way. When approaching a problem in a descriptive way the common practice is to talk about what happened rather than talking about the person involved.

It is important for your employees to remain confident in themselves rather than being attacked, these type of negative correctional tactics can cause an employee to be submissive and paralytic over time, Paralytic behavior can be caused by an employee “being too afraid of the consequences of their decisions” (Forbes). Once an employee starts to become afraid of making decisions it is very hard to get great leadership qualities from them.

I believe that it is imperative that my organization understand what is going on in the operations department. I feel as though someone from our organization needs to step in and make sure that the training of the younger individuals is controlled by an organizational developer which is familiar with supportive communication. It is important that our company realize that their new hires will be the future leaders and we need to instill that notion into the training of our future leaders. I believe that even though the more senior employees do have the experience to make the better decisions, it is also important for them to keep the newer employees involved in the decision making process. We need to breed leaders within the organization not just people that will comply with orders.

References:

Boss, J. (n.d.). How To Overcome The 'Analysis Paralysis' Of Decision-Making. Retrieved June 20, 2015, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffboss/2015/03/20/how-to-overcome-the-analysis-paralysis-of-decision-making/

Whetten, D., & Cameron, K. (2011). Developing management skills (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.