269 | Project Success Starts When Complaining Stops

Art of Consulting Podcast

The host explores the detrimental impact of complaining in both professional and personal contexts, arguing that it creates toxicity and hin

Key takeaways

• Complaining acts like 'poison' in a glass of water, gradually degrading the quality of one's surroundings.
• A former Oracle Vice President implemented a rule against openly criticizing competitors to clients to maintain professionalism.

Main topics

• The toxicity of complaining
• Professionalism in consulting

Notable quotes

When we stop complaining, we find better solutions.

Conclusion

Success in leadership and life is found by controlling the urge to com

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome to the Art of Consulting podcast with Andy Fry and Kat Lam. We are seasoned IT consultants, CPAs, and professional development connoisseurs. Each episode, we bring you an inspiring message to help you discover that X factor as a professional in your field so that you can gain the success that you know you deserve in your career and in your life. Speaker 1 (0:25) Hey, everybody. Today, I want to talk about something that goes on pretty much every single organization, and that's complaining about others. One of the things that I was told is way back when I started at Oracle and I went to consulting, we had a vice president who had a rule. He said, we do not want to openly complain about our competitors. And he would say that if we go to a client side and our competitors are there and they do something or they've made a decision or we're cleaning up a mistake, we don't want to complain about them with the client. And I always found that that role was a really good rule to operate from. to really not openly complain about others or openly complain about your competitors. And one of the things that complaining does, and I'm going to say this again, you probably know many times the episodes driven by also my reminder to myself to make sure that I'm operating at a sort of a better level. And it sometimes make mistakes that I've learned already, or I come across something or I get, you know, again, just make a mistake and start doing things that are things I know better. And this is one of them. You know, sometimes I start to complain about other people or clients or other things that are kind of going on. And one of the things I've learned is when we stop complaining, we find better solutions. First of all, we're in a better frame of mind. So our outlook becomes more healthy and more clear. And when we start to complain immediately, it's a toxic. sort of, we're in a toxic situation at some level. Toxic might be a very strong word, but essentially that's what we're doing. You know, if we had a glass of water, we'd want to drink a clean glass of water. We wouldn't start like just dropping in little drips, a little drop of poison into that glass of water. We would never drink it. Right. And because we now have poisonous glass of water, even if it's just one drop. And so when we start to complain, it's really the same thing. We're starting to add some sort of poison, some sort of toxic behavior into our surroundings, into our setting. It doesn't mean that we never complain, right? We're human beings and we get frustrated. We have to sort of release some of the steam that's coming off or the anxiety that we're dealing with or the frustration, right? Or the disappointment or whatever the situation is. So we will complain. I mean, we're humans and we make mistakes. What we want to do is we want to eliminate the complaining where it's sport and where we are lured into the constant complaining where we're just looking for things. things we're picking on. And once those complaints become personal, you know, I remember I was on a project one time where I worked with somebody and they did not get along with somebody from the client side. And then it started to become very personal. Can't even stand the person's voice. And I'm like, so I talked to the person. I said, look, you know, look, we really need to deal with this. And, you know, because it's starting to become personal and the person didn't see it as personal. They just said, you know, this person just frustrates me. And we kind of talked through it because, you know, once you start to pick on the personal characteristics of somebody else, it is going to be personal and it's going to. explode. So you want to make sure that planning never gets there. And the best way to do it is to stop it right as it starts. One of the reasons we complain is, I mean, of course, we want to let off