Sat, Mar 31, 2007 page9

• Sore losers need a accept value of critics at work

  • By Sally O'Reilly / THE GUARDIAN
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  Clearly you are brilliant. You are the best a boss could ever hope for and an example to all junior -- and indeed some senior -- members of staff. But sometimes the halo will slip -- you'll do something silly in an interview, be overlooked for promotion or get told to smarten up your act. In a blink of an eye, you'll go from star to dunce. Praise will turn to criticism, and work won't seem half so jolly. And neither will you.

  But if you're in the most enormous huff, you won't be alone. We are turning into a generation of sore losers. The tiniest setback heralds a descent into abject misery. Look at pop stars' tantrums when they miss out on awards, or soccer players' petulant flouncing if decisions go against them.

  Time to pull yourself together: coping with criticism or failure is a valuable skill, whether you are the most junior secretary in the office or secretary-general of the UN. And some of us need to learn how to do it better.

  "If you are going to be successful, you need to have failed," said Ivan Robertson, an occupational psychologist. "To take on challenges and give yourself some sense of achievement, you must test the boundaries. And sometimes taking on a challenge will not work out."

  Developing robust survival strategies is the smart response.

  "What makes a difference is how we deal with success and failure," Robertson says. "When we have a failure, we let it reverberate and keep thinking about it, whereas we take success for granted. We dwell more on the minuses than on the pluses."

  Enjoying and analyzing success is a way of withstanding failure and putting it in perspective. But we have a tendency to dismiss our successes as accidental, while we pore over our failures as if they hold the key to our personality. This is not the approach taken by businessmen Alan Sugar and Donald Trump. These ferocious Apprentice frontmen have survived career blips to dwarf the timid underachievements of the average office worker.

  At one point Trump had business debts of US$3.5 billion, but said that bankruptcy "really wouldn't matter that much."

  Compared with that, a few harsh words from the boss or missing out on a second interview suddenly looks a little less catastrophic.

  You don't have to be a global entrepreneur to benefit from taking a bullish attitude either.

  "In one sense, there is no such thing as `failure,' there is only `feedback.' Everything that happens to you can be useful," says Gladeana McMahon, codirector of the Center for Coaching. "If you are not performing well, you need strategies for improving your performance, and you need to break this into small steps."

  McMahon also counsels against procrastinating in the hope your problems will go away.

  "Whatever happens, take action. Talk to people early -- see your manager and ask for more time or more support. Don't wait until the last minute because you can't face up to what's happening," McMahon says.

  Sometimes, falling out of favor at work creeps up on us unawares. One minute we are the star in the office, and the next minute we are invisible. And as hard as we try to move up the next level, we seem to be stuck -- or worse, we start believing those interview rejections are personal.

  In these situations, it's important to take the long view. Even painful interviews can help you hone your professional skills.

  "You need to put things in perspective, be specific about what has happened and avoid leaping to the emotive conclusion," advises chartered psychologist Jeremy Adams, a course leader at London Metropolitan University.

  "Don't think: `This has happened, so I am useless, so I will never get another job, so I can't pay my mortgage,'" he says.

  Don't feel bad about having a negative attitude either -- that only makes it harder to shift.

  "Our culture generally gives people poor self-esteem. We live in a self-denigrating society, and our resilience is much lower than it was," Adams says.

  And whatever else, don't take your lead from television. The hysterical contestants on The X Factor and Fame Academy have no place in the office.

  "We behave in a way which would have been considered pathetic two generations ago,"Adams says. "It's an instant `get,' instant gratification society, whereas our parents and grandparents didn't expect to get everything they wanted. If they were determined to achieve something, they worked hard and for a long time."

  What's more, Adams believes that we agonize over failures that are irrelevant. Not only do we need to get a grip on our emotions, we need to develop clarity about our true ambitions.

  "What you may see as failure may be different from how other people see it," he says. "Whether you agree to see it as they see it, is up to you. Did you really want that promotion or did you just think you wanted it?"
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