Is Your Negative Employee a Problem or a Warning Sign?

“Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won’t make us happier.”  ~ Randy Pausch, author of The Last Lecture

Every workplace has someone who complains. The cleaner and safer approach is to label them “negative” and move on. But that label might be doing more hiding than explaining.

Negativity isn’t always meanness, or noise. Sometimes it’s just an unmet need with nowhere else to go. Sometimes it’s a real problem that nobody’s fixed yet, spoken by one person who’s willing to name it. And sometimes, yes, it’s a habit. For some people, complaining is how they stand out from the crowd, with no real interest in fixing what they’re naming.

The danger for leaders and growing employees isn’t the complaint itself. The real danger is how contagious it is. Research on how emotions spread tells us that negativity travels faster and sticks longer than being positive. And this is true whether it is face to face, in meetings, even across digital networks between people who’ve never met. One complaining negative voice can quietly shift the whole team’s mood.

So before dismissing the “negative employee,” ask the harder question: Are we looking at a pattern of “just complaining”, or are they sending a signal we haven’t learned to read yet?

Learn more in my next free webinar Enough Already: Combating Employee Negativity Before It Spreads.  Thursday, August 13^th 11:30-12:00 Central. You can register HERE.

The more we know, the more we grow.

Keep growing.

~Jeff