No Fear! A lesson from health care patient service for managment training

 Dear Reader - Your intermittently faithful managment training blogger is back with you after a day in surgery. Thank you, thank you - but no biggie: they say that brain transplants are quite routine these days.

Seriously, though, although I came away mightily impressed with the competence and solicitude of all involved, I'm also only now, hours later, coming out of the fog caused by the pain pill I was offered in the recovery room. I can't help but feel that I'd have been much better off returning to normal life as quickly as possible.

Patient - sorry, customer - service in health care strives to make the patient as comfortable as possible. I'm no tough guy, but my tolerance for pain was greatly underestimated, and I feel I'm not alone. We rush to eliminate pain and then wonder why our children do drugs in imitation of their parents and of what they see in commercials.

As Charlie Parker said, thinking of his needle, "I never have to get the blues." But the blues can be useful, both as creative inspirations and as organizational learning tools: what are the causes of the pain? Do we need to do anything about it, and if so, what?

I'm no masochist, but you don't have to be one to know that pain serves many valuable functions, not the least of which is to help the patient gauge the effects of post-operative over-exertion.

I'm no biologist either, but those scientists will be glad to tell you that any organism that can't transmit negative feedback - including pain - is doomed. (Think organizations here as well as organisms! For managers, it's important to realize that organizational pain can be an extremely valuable tool in evaluating their decisions. And sometimes, that pain is an indication that the desired results are being achieved - you've created productive eu-stress rather than counter-productive distress.

So it's important not to make assumptions in this connection: take the institution I worked with which used Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's famous stages of grief model as the framework for workshops on dealing with change. This approach seriously underestimated the employees' enthusiasm for change, especially in a hide-bound organization.

And finally, pain is an integral and healthy part of being alive. Athletes know this. ("Feel the burn!" "No pain, no gain.") So does the military. ("Pain is weakness leaving the body," "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger!") And M.F.K. Fisher reminds me, in "Sister Age," her book on aging, that Saint Francis not only went through life accompanied by his "his brother the Sun, and his sister the Moon," but also by "his brother Pain." If it's good enough for a sensitive luminary who could communicate with birds, it's good enough for me - I've invested a fortune on birdseed, hummingbird nectar, feeders, etc., and these latter-day dinosaurs still act as skittish as if I were fattening them up for the kill.

By the way, if you haven't already started populating the queue of your management-training-relevant movies, Zeffirelli's gloriously nutty and inspiring movie, "Brother Sun, Sister Moon," needs to be on it - remember, classic management theory invariably cites the Roman Catholic Church as the historical model for the modern corporation...

So listen to your body - and to the body politic. "Take the temperature of the group" - and of the organization - and learn. In the workshop setting, get your managers to draw up examples of negative feedback and how management reacted to them, and then have the participants brainstorm a checklists of steps to follow to incorporate - as it were! - the lessons of that feedback, of that "pain."

And to think I only took half the proffered pill, and I'm still loopy!

Ouch! I'd love to blather on, but my body's telling me to change position. Bye!