From Complaint to Commitment: A Spring Leadership Challenge

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Spring is here! An opportunity to make room for the new and get rid of what no longer serves us. This month, we challenge you to clear out complaints, reclaim your power and step into making powerful requests and commitments.

In our work with leaders, we get curious about complaints. We like to explore what’s underneath them: What is the unmet need? Again and again, we find that our complaints offer valuable insight into what we truly care about. A complaint often reveals a deeper commitment. When we recognize and acknowledge our complaints, we can take responsibility for the commitments behind them—and from there, identify the requests we need to make and the actions we can take to move forward.

Why This is Important

As leaders, our language carries enormous weight. It sets the tone for our teams and organizations. A leader’s words can inspire or diminish, create momentum or stall progress. That’s why it’s essential to recognize when we’re speaking the language of complaints—and when we’re speaking the language of commitments.

The Language of Complaint

• Easily produced

• Expresses what we cannot stand

• Leaves us feeling whiny or cynical

• Generates frustration and a sense of powerlessness

• Rarely moves beyond venting

• Produces no meaningful action or change

The Language of Commitment

• Intentionally created

• Expresses what we stand for

• Leaves us feeling energized and hopeful

• Generates forward momentum

• Leads to action, transformation, and powerful outcomes

What Are You Committed To?

As an exercise, we suggest you try bringing curiosity to your complaints—to transform them into action by uncovering the commitments lurking beneath them.

Here’s a simple exercise to support that shift:

1.        On a piece of paper, jot down your top 10 complaints. These can be about people, processes, projects. It might be:  too many meetings with no actual time to do the work discussed, never being able to reach a real person when you need help or the ballooning array of apps to learn and re-learn at work, in the name of increasing productivity —anything you find yourself complaining about.

2.        For each complaint, ask yourself:

• What’s important to me about this?

• What am I doing—or not doing—that keeps this complaint alive?

• What am I truly committed to here?

3. For each complaint, identify one action you can take in service of the commitment you’ve discovered or revealed.

4. Keep your commitments visible. Return to them whenever you catch yourself slipping back into complaint.

Here’s to a season of fresh perspective and powerful leadership. Let us know what opens up for you.

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