No power to the negaholics!

A gloomy November mood. The wind sweeps wet leaves through Hamburg’s streets, the cold creeps up my spine and before I can even take my coat off at the checkroom, I hear two voices from the conference room: “Have you heard about Jasper’s new idea?” “Oh that, it’s no good anyway.” “I don’t think it’ll ever work. Well, I’m not going along with it anyway.” Phew, I think, another gathering of self-confessed negaholics Where do some people get the unshakeable certainty that everything always goes wrong? Mustn’t that be terribly exhausting? Well, maybe not. After all, if nothing works anyway, there’s no need to make an effort. So perhaps a little bit of pessimism is quite practical at times.

I quickly put this November-foggy thought to one side, because the eternal naysayers are more than just a minor nuisance from an economic point of view. In companies, they poison the working atmosphere, slow down innovation and hang around the neck of productivity as a whole like a heavy millstone. **It is therefore important to recognize negaholics in the team (as well as in the boardroom) and to develop strategies for dealing with them.

**But how do you recognize negaholics? The easiest way to identify negaholics is by their fundamentally negative attitude. No matter what the issue is: the negaholic sees the bad sides first: Obstacles, reasons for exclusion, risks. Negaholics think in terms of problems, not solutions. First and foremost, they see what speaks against an idea, a candidate, a project, etc. Such chronic doubters are often analytically strong personalities. Analysts can usually give good reasons for their objections and concerns, and in some cases it is certainly a good idea to carefully examine and weigh up their statements. Nevertheless, it makes sense to limit the activities of chronic doubters so that they do not become all-purpose brakes.

**In addition to the doubters, you often find the type of frustrated negaholic in companies. These are people who sometimes openly, sometimes covertly, reject everything new as a matter of principle, block any change, no longer get involved anywhere - because it makes no sense anyway. **According to my observations, we are often dealing with people who have a low level of self-confidence and feel they have little capacity to act. Sometimes there are deep-seated professional disappointments behind this kind of behavior, but sometimes it is also a matter of cowards who use their dismissive attitude to opt out of everything and try to avoid confrontation in this way.

Typical phrases used by negaholics are:

• “I have no influence over that anyway.”
• “It won’t work, it’s no good, it won’t work.”
• “Is it worth it?”
• “It didn’t work back then.”
• “I don’t need to listen to that, it won’t work anyway.”
• “Why should we make an effort?”
• “Nothing will ever change.”

Dealing with negaholics is somewhat laborious. You need staying power and resistance to the r isk of infection. In my day-to-day work, I have had good experiences with consistently demanding a positive perspective from negative alcoholics. The following measures help me to do this:

1. Solution orientation instead of focusing on problems: In meetings or discussions, I counter endless successions of problems with a consistent interruption. Only contributions that contain positive formulations are permitted. This sometimes causes confusion at first, but at the same time releases enormous creative energy. Questions that support this process are What needs to happen for XY to be a success? How can you specifically contribute to making XY a success? What do you need to successfully implement XY?

2. Focusing on the future instead of dealing with the past: This pattern is particularly effective in crisis situations. It doesn’t matter how a problem arose, who is “to blame”, what was done “wrong” in the past, etc. The cause of a problem rarely leads to its solution. What matters is what we make of the situation now: “We are where we are - but here we go!” Where do we want to go? What does the future look like? What steps do we need to take to get there? These are the important questions.

3. Putting the brakes on: If nothing helps, I put notorious negative thinkers out of action. If they can’t come up with a positive reformulation, their objections are publicly dismissed as killer phrases. This may be pedagogically dubious, but it is quite effective.

Copyright photo: Christian Setzwein