What Result Are You After?

When I worked in HR (in a previous lifetime), I had an employee come to me extremely agitated. He had reached his boiling point – for three years, he had secretly felt zero respect for his manager. And he simply could not tolerate another day of taking direction from her. He decided that he needed to tell her how he felt. As he sat in my office telling me what he was going to say to her the next morning in this big “Come to Jesus” meeting, I let him vent a while before I interrupted him.

“So… What result are you after?” I asked. “When you tell her that you haven’t respected her for the last three years, that you cringe every time you get a directive from her, that you disagree with her strategic plan for the department, what exactly are you expecting?”

My question stopped him. I…