The right response when employees vent

When employees tell you about a problem they're having, how many of the following counseling strategies do you use?

• Reassuring them that everything will be OK.
• Offering advice from your own experience.
• Asking pertinent questions to gain more information to help you determine what solutions are likely to work best.
• Analyzing what's wrong and offering some suggestions.

If you take any of those approaches, stop. Reassuring, asking questions and giving advice are not helpful responses when someone has a problem. In fact, those tactics are more likely to shut down communication and prevent the person from gaining the clarity needed to resolve the situation.

So what should you do? Try this old stand-by: active listening. As you probably already know, active listening involves paying complete attention to the other person—focusing on understanding feelings and then reflecting or mirroring back what you hear, leaving your own feelings and opinions out.

Example: Suppose a staffer works up the gumption to tell you "I'm so overwhelmed by these quotas; I'm never going to make it!" You can mirror back what the person said with comments such as: "You sound pretty upset," "You're concerned that they're way too high" or "The new quotas are making you really nervous."

The person will likely feel a tremendous sense of relief because it seems that you understood. That will encourage your staffer to keep talking, eventually moving deeper into the problem and coming closer to identifying a solution without your input.