Stress Reduction Tip: Turn Your Blenders Into Helicopters

A senior manager in catering came out with this little gem of a 're-framing' technique and it fits perfectly with something I've done in the past (I'm sure you have too) but the imagery really solidifies the meaning for me.

You look at a situation that seems to be chopping your expectations up and say 'how can I turn this into an opportunity that lifts me up instead'.    Here's a professional example:

I was supervising a team and in that team one person was a poor performer (to the extent they would fall asleep not due to tiredness but due to sheer lack of motivation - they weren't in a job that was right for them at that time).  This colleague just wasn't developing and no matter how many times they went through the workplace standard training their performance just didn't improve.  But something started to happen alongside the 'problem' ...

... another more senior and able colleague found this colleagues' behaviour a bit irritating and started to develop bespoke, more user-friendly mini-training programmes to bring the non-performing colleague up to scratch.  Their training materials were great (even though they had never done this kind of thing before).

But the colleague didn't improve.  The 'trainer' talked to me about creating more materials and I told them to go ahead. However they were also getting more frustrated as to why the unmotivated colleague couldn't 'get it'.  The unmotivated colleague, by the way, was a teenager and this was their first job.

I started taking the materials the 'trainer' colleague was producing and passed them to other managers to see if they would find them useful.  The training material got continually more effective but at the same time the trainer started to get more frustrated and started to behave more harshly towards the less motivated colleague; which I had to put a stop to.  The trainer started talking about the need to dismiss the lower performing colleague and I explained this person had in fact led to improvements in the entire team performance while they themselves had earned a reputation in the organisation that would servie them well (the trainer was an ambitious person and had previously voiced their sense of being 'stuck'.  People were talking about head-hunting them from me).

Everybody outside my team loved their work.

A while later I organised the transfer of the less-motivated teenage member of staff into a role they felt more motivated to do and the 'trainer' was recruited as a paid training officer and now earns twice their previous salary.

I took a blender situation and used it to lift everybody up.   Several years later I met up with the no-longer-a-teenager less motivated team member who told me the training they had received had 'hit home' after the training had ended and they had eventually gone back into the same type of work with another company - and enjoyed it.

Whenever you're in a difficult situation take a step back and see if there's something there you can regard as potential  'helicopter material' and focus  on the benefits you can get from a bad situation.  In fact sometimes it's only when you get thrown into the blender you realise just what you're capable of (the situation in this scenario acted as a catalyst for the trainer too, although if they resented the experience too much they probably missed the lesson and may remain stuck where they are now until another blender appears and they flip it upwards) .

What blender situations have you turned into helicopters lately?

- Carl