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Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
Dear Bev,
We recently had an offsite for our team, and I came away frustrated and discouraged. We were supposed to be open and honest with each other (there are a lot of problems on the team right now). Rather than have people speak the truth, the person running the offsite picked on me the entire time. I’m not the most senior person, but I’ve been there the longest. He was degrading toward me and really didn’t solve anything — only made me feel badly about my role on the team.
I voiced this to our senior partner who chose the facilitator, and he asked me to speak with the facilitator. Rather than take any ownership, he put it all back on me — that I had to “look in the mirror” and that I couldn’t be a mentor to other, newer team members without owning my own stuff (he actually said a swear word here but I won’t put that in writing).
This whole experience has me questioning whether I am a valuable person on this team. On a daily basis, team members come to me with complaints and disagreements with others on the team. I am not much for gossip, so when this happens I try and help to open the dialogue and get people to see each other’s sides. I feel like in doing this I opened myself up to being the problem.
Is there anything I can do at this point to repair my reputation?
O.B.
Dear O.B.,
Notes like this always make me sad. An offsite with a great facilitator can be such a powerful experience. Ideally, they are a way to get team members talking about things they might otherwise be uncomfortable sharing with one another. I’m wondering if the facilitator felt most comfortable with you and so was using you as an example of how to share feedback, hoping you would be willing to open up and share some of what you hear from your colleagues? Sometimes facilitators think the “tough love” approach is the best one to get people to see the dynamics of what is going on.
I don’t know this person. Generally, I try and refrain from mind-reading, but I am giving an alternative view of what he might have been trying to accomplish. Sometimes the best intentions don’t play out in practice as we hope they will!
The question is, what do you do from here? I think you have three viable options, and I encourage you to do what’s most comfortable for you:
1. Call your team together and explain how uncomfortable you felt being called out at the offsite. Let them know that you want to set the record straight about your feelings re: the team and what was said about you. This is the most direct approach and would only work if you are a direct person who can speak your mind and do it in a non-accusatory, non-defensive manner.
2. Pull team members aside as they come to you to complain or disparage others on the team. Let them know that, after what happened at the offsite, you are no longer comfortable being in the position of “third-party listener” and that you’d prefer they address any issues they might have directly with the person they are complaining about.
You can let them know you felt singled out in the offsite, and you don’t want to put yourself in this position again. Tell them just as they are now coming to you to share negative perspectives about someone else, you would have hoped they would have shared things like this at the offsite as well. This conversation would be something you do person-by-person as they come to you to speak their minds.
3. Let the whole thing eventually blow over. I know it is sensitive for you right now, and sometimes people have a hard time letting go of something that was really hurtful (this all depends on the person, some people can shake things off quickly, too). Determine whether you believe you can get past this at some point. I won’t negate how raw this is for you right now, but things do eventually revert to where they were. You could very well end up moving on and forgetting about it. If you don’t believe you can do this at some point, options #1 or #2 might be better for you.
