A Complaint a Day

A Complaint a Day

During an extremely stressful period in my earlier career in the banking sector, I once heard a comment about a Blue. All of us were working every day and night, and many of us were showing the stress. Frustration was hanging in the air.

Our credit controller was in the middle of the whole thing. Nothing got to her. She never even acted stressed. Her face was absolutely indecipherable, and her gestures were as limited and moderate as always. While the rest of us ate our lunch on the go, she took her full sixty minutes and ate in peace and quiet … it was as if nothing could disturb her peace.

Then one of my Yellow-Red colleagues said, “She’s not normal. She doesn’t have any feelings in her body.”

Back then, it sounded logical to me, but when you think about it, it can’t be true. Blues simply have less need to communicate than Greens. So they simply don’t do it. Some things are turned inwards even for Blues. Those who are quick thinkers may wonder if Blues run the risk of burnout just as much as Greens do. Not at all. They have a system to keep stress under control.

Metaphorically speaking, Blues have as big a beer barrel as Greens have, but there is one crucial difference: At the bottom of the barrel, there’s a handy little tap. This tap gives a Blue a valve to release part of the contents of the barrel. He can regulate the pressure whenever he wishes to.

Moreover, the tap leaks. It’s not tight enough to create a perfect seal, and small drops drip most of the time. A Blue’s dissatisfaction comes out in the form of tiny grumblings.

“Just look. Someone has misplaced the pen again! Typical! Now I’ll have to finish this off myself. As usual, I get the most boring task. There’s no structure here. Typical.”

And so he goes on. His pinpricks affect those around him, but what they hear all the time is just a muttering trumpet. The embers don’t fan into a fire. We interpret it as a perpetual whining, but the discontent is real. And because a Blue isn’t sufficiently active to instigate something, he’ll argue about things rather than doing something about them. It’s all based on complaints that others should see what he sees, that he doesn’t have any authority to act, or that he’s simply in a bad mood. But for him, this is a great way of keeping the pressure under control. So the barrel will never need to be emptied out over somebody’s desk, and thus serious catastrophes are avoided.

The way to manage his nagging is to ask counterquestions. Ask for concrete examples. Ask for suggestions for improvement. It may, in fact, be the case that the Blue has solved the problem that is plaguing him, but that he needs a straight question in order for him to step forward and suggest a solution.